Software Testing Talents Training Mode under the Background of Talent Training

Wei Zheng, Yueming Huang, Chen Feng＊, Wenpeng Wang, Jie Chen

Abstract: With the adjustment of the economic structure and the transformation of economic development momentum, accelerating the development and construction of the new engineering majors has become the realistic needs of social and economic development. Based on the teaching requirement of software testing subjects, this paper puts forward a new software testing talents training mode under the background of talent training, including industry- academy cooperation,flipped classroom, small-class teaching, etc.

Key words: new engineering majors; industry-academy cooperation; flipped classroom; small-class teaching

1 Background

The economic development of our country is entering a crucial period of structural adjustment, transformation and upgrading, and the momentum of new and old growth is being transformed. A new round of science and technology and industry revolution with the Internet as the core is gaining momentum, and the new technologies, new products, new formats and new models are booming. Innovation has become a new stadium for international competition. It not only provides strategic opportunities for the backward countries to catch up and leaps, but also will further aggravate the international talent competition.Engineering education and industrial development are closely linked and mutually supportive[1]. The development of new industries depends on engineering education to provide talented personnel support. In particular, in response to the challenges of international competition in new technologies and industries, we must proactively deploy engineering science and technology personnel to accelerate the development and construction of emerging engineering, transformation and upgrading of traditional engineering, improving the ability of education to support the development of the service industry[2]. It can be said that proactive placement and placement and deepening of engineering education in place will have a positive effect on economic restructuring and upgrading; on the contrary,backward engineering education will delay the process of industrial upgrading. Talent is the primary resource for developing a new economy. Because a large number of researchers are concentrated in universities and research institutes, some college graduates are out of touch, and many new economic enterprises reflect that the biggest problem is talent. Education is the fundamental characteristic of training talents for social production activities. To accelerate the development of new economy, we must develop new engineering and improve the support system for new economic development. The characteristics of new engineering should include "new ideas, new knowledge, new opportunities, new features, new models and new talents, as shown in Fig. 1.

In 2001, in order to speed up the development of software industry, the ministry of education combined with the national planning commission and the ministry of finance, supported 37 colleges and universities to run demonstration software colleges. In the past 16 years, based on the guiding ideology of actively developing, standardizing management, pioneering and innovating ,the exemplary software institutes aimed at cultivating elite software engineering personnel, deepened institutional mechanisms and education and teaching reform, deepened industry-academy cooperation and international training, established an open and socialized system of running a school,implemented a flexible teacher appointment system and a system of personnel-centered distribution.The exemplary software institutes have become a veritable "special zone" for engineering education reform in our country[3]. The reform of the demonstration software college has explored the effective ways of talent cultivation in the software industry, and preliminarily answered the question of how to construct the new engineering:The reform of the system and mechanism is the premise.

Emphasize the cooperation of school-enterprise and establish an open socialized running system; adopt the distribution system centered on talent cultivation; attract enterprises to participate in teaching management,and establish external evaluation system with the participation of enterprises. The reform of talent training is the core. Learning from engineering education concept like CDIO, flexibly set the professional direction according to the demand of industry and development of technology; develop the talent training scheme guided by the demand of market and the improvement of the international competition ability; exploring student-centered training mode, etc. Industry- academy cooperation is the key.School-enterprises jointly develop training objectives and training programs; jointly develop and construct courses; jointly build laboratories and training practice bases; jointly train the teachers and jointly do some research.

Software testing is a highly technical professional course, which requires a high degree of professionalism.Software testing personnel training mode should pay attention to cultivate high-level application-oriented engineering and top academic research talent, on the cover of basic theory + practice application, discuss the cultivation of personnel professional quality of the test,the mainstream industry test tools and software testing research in cutting-edge technologies and topics. On the one hand, it can prepare for the students to adapt to the job as soon as possible; on the other hand, it can tap the potential of students and lay a foundation for further academic research in software testing field. Through the study of the existing construction experience, we specially put forward the software test talent training mode based on the concept of new mode.

Fig. 1 Structural drawing of new engineering features.

2 Research Contents

The research contents are mainly studied from the aspects of industry- academy cooperation, small-class teaching, MOOC & flipped classroom and so on.

2.1 Industry- academy cooperation

Our research team cooperated with Nanjing MoocTest Information Technology Co., Ltd. approved a project of cooperative education system successfully in December 2017, which Nanjing MoocTest Information Technology Co., Ltd. will provide with software test training platform in 2017-2018 academic year. Nanjing MoocTest Information Technology Co., Ltd.

Based on the teaching needs of the research team,Nanjing MoocTest Information Technology Co., Ltd.summarize the enterprise testing technology and testing process, standardize the test process, and combine the simplified working process and related application technology with curriculum teaching. Add the relevant content in the theoretical teaching, including the use of enterprise application testing techniques like Jenkins, Git, and Hadoop, as well as automated testing of Python scripts in Unix environments. The original teaching content system is expanded to enrich the teaching content. For some unintelligible courses and the courses with lot of professional terms, the research team specifically invited technical director of the company to the experimental class to ensure the quality of teaching.

In addition, the MoocTest provided by Nanjing MoocTest Information Technology Co., Ltd., has made a constructive contribution to the practical training of the research team. The implementation of comprehensive practice training mainly focuses on two aspects, one is the software testing practice in experiment lessons, the other is the competition training of software test competition.

2.1.1 Design of experimental course

The platform opens two main categories, developer testing and mobile testing, for the research team, as well as three corresponding teacher accounts and 150 student accounts. Take the design of developer-tested course as an example, the course time is 6 weeks, and there are 24-30 hours in the course.

In addition, the platform can provide students with exercises, examination questions, grades and other related information to download. Students can log in to the system to download relevant documents to learn,the system will record student's answer, students can make a leak filling according to the final statistical results, this platform will help them to consolidate their knowledge acquired.

2.1.2 Software test competition

The National Student Software Testing Contest is a national competition organized jointly by the Software Engineering Teaching Steering Committee of the Ministry of Education and the Software Engineering Committee of the Chinese Computer Society. Since its establishment, the competition has attracted nearly 4,000 students from more than 300 universities in China, it includes developer testing, mobile application testing, web security testing, etc., a total of six sub-competitions. The developer test and the mobile application test are mainly hosted by Nanjing MoocTest Information Technology Co., Ltd. The platforms used by the two competitions are provided by the company. The competition-related criteria are formulated by the company. Take the Developer Test Contest as an example. The Developer Test Contest mainly evaluates the scores of the contest through two criteria: statement / branch coverage and mutation kill rate. Finally, ranking according to the results, select the best contestants in each division to enter the final.

2.2 MOOC & f ipped classroom

Students' learning process is mainly divided into two stages: the first stage is "knowledge transfer" and the second stage is knowledge internalization. In traditional teaching way, knowledge transfer was completed by classroom teaching, and knowledge internalization is accomplished by homework, operation or practice after class. While the flipped classroom has an absolute opposite mode, knowledge transfer was fulfilled prior to the class by video source or others, knowledge internalization is fulfilled in the classroom by teachers cooperated with student.

In order to execute this kind of new teaching mode，the teaching process was divided into three sections as shown below: pre-class learning, class discussion and reflection.

2.2.1 Pre-class learning

The object of this section is to realize knowledge transfer. Students could take learning online via MOOC platform and participating in discussion. The specific steps are as shown below. First, teachers will send their next week's lesson learning schedule to students via social platforms, the schedule including this week's video lessons and reading materials, online assignments, online discussion, and online unit testing.Teachers urge students to fulfill the learning task list,know the progress of student learning. Teachers can also log in to the MOOC platform to browse course resources, interact with students by social platforms or MOOC forums, deal with the problems that were encountered by students in pre-class learning, and prepare for classroom activities.

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2.2.2 Class discussion

The main goal of classroom activities is to realize the internalization of knowledge. The key to improve learning efficiency is to fulfill knowledge internalization by the design of classroom activities.The pre-curricular learning in flipped class can realize low-level goals such as knowledge acquisition and preliminary application, while the realization of highlevel goals such as analysis, synthesis and evaluation requires the design of classroom activities. In order to realize the internalization of knowledge, steps should be executed as shown below. First, Q & A. Based on the feedback of students' pre-class learning, the teacher in charge of classifies the difficult problems in a targeted manner, and complements relevant exercises to enhance the understanding and consolidation of knowledge. Second, create situations. Combine the curriculum objectives with curriculum knowledge system to create problem situations, put forward some questions of inquiry value or design some challenging and creative training projects so that students can conduct cooperative learning in small groups. Third,to explore cooperation. The members of each group answer question or task independently, then the group writing inquiry, in the process of inquiry to achieve the goal of analysis and comprehensive teaching.

2.2.3 Ref ection

Teachers need to organize student achievement and share outstanding works after class. In addition, they could evaluate and reflect the whole teaching process to improve the next instructional design. The task of students is classroom learning reflection and knowledge expansion. Students evaluate and reflect on the whole process, and can continue discussions after class for individual problems left over.

2.3 Small class seminar learning

Small class seminar is an important part of the new teaching mode. It places more emphasis on the examination of students' learning process, focuses on training and enhancing postgraduate research ability,writing ability, oral expression ability, teamwork ability, independent thinking and independent judgment ability. It promotes the change of teaching mode based on student-centered learning. At the same time, it also put forward higher requirements for elective students,there must be a solid study of the literature, a positive extra-curricular research and adequate preparation for the classroom speech.

According to the teaching plan, the size of small classes is limited to 15～20 people. In order to control the size of the population and then improve the effectiveness of teaching aids, six teaching assistants are set up in the software testing course. Small class discussion is mainly to promote student initiative,exercise students autonomous learning and research ability. Small class adopt the mode that the teacher presided over the seminar and students in charge of the designing , the teaching assistant arranged the discussion topic one week in advance, students to a group of 5 to 8 people to choose the topic of discussion,each student access to information, to fulfill the division of labor to discuss the contents of each group were responsible, such as the collection of the topic needs,block diagram, pseudo-code and so on, then elaborate the key point, the difficult point and the idea of the experiment debugging process; Finally, each student fulfill the task they responsible, such as the thematic reports or PPT, and then fulfill the experiment task to realize the design in a certain amount of time , proceed to design instructions, explanations and respondents.

3 Results Analysis

3.1 Course selection

Since the establishment of the software testing course,the number of online course enrollments has totaled more than 2,300 people, and the cumulative change in numbers has continued to increase. The changes in the cumulative number of elective courses are shown in Fig. 2 below. According to the latest statistics, during the past two weeks, the average number of new online electives per day has reached 8, as shown in Fig. 2. The situation shows that the course has been carried out successfully and is being approved by the majority of teachers and students.

Fig. 2 Changes of the number of elective students.

3.2 Learning

User activity refers to the percentage of active users in the total number of elective courses in this course.According to statistics of software testing courses in online schools, student users still maintain a high degree of learning activity. The learning activity in the past two weeks is shown in Fig. 3.

In order to measure the number of students who watch the course for a fixed period of time in the week and schedule the courses according to the time period hot spots, we statistically survey the students' learning and watching data in the past week and realize the visualization of data Hot spots in the form of display.Hotspots mainly use Python language built-in library Plotly to simulate the realization of the relevant hot spots distribution shown in Fig. 4.

Fig. 3 User activity bar chart.

According to the hotspot distribution statistics,the students study time mainly concentrated in the 13: 00 ～ 17: 00,so we can consider the time to give online guidance for students.

3.3 Student score

The new teaching model improves the assessment methods of the final exams and pays more attention to students' comprehensive scores and learning process. The evaluation will be conducted via the method that was made of 10% average grade&attendance (attendance rate), 10%online learning (MOOC video quality assessment), 30% experiment test(test scores, assessment of software test competition),and 50% final exam scores calculation, based on the results of the new students in the training mode of the test results, the distribution of student performance segments shown in Fig. 5.

Then compared with the performance of the same period in previous years, the implementation of the new model to analyze the effect, as shown in Fig. 6.

By comparison, we can see that in the new mode of cultivation, the average grade of students has been significantly improved as compared with the past, and the failure rate has declined. The percentage of those who have achieved excellent grades (scores＞ 80 marks)has risen sharply. This result proves the effectiveness of the new teaching model.

Fig. 4 Learning time hot spots.

Fig. 5 Student scores in new training model.

Fig. 6 Comparison of student achievement in two training modes.

4 Conclusion

The new training mode arouses students' interest in learning, ensures the freedom of learning time and improves the learning efficiency of students effectively.After teaching experiment, the method has achieved good results.