Bug Hunting Games to Add Enthusiasm in Software Testing and Programming Classes

Although high-quality software is key for a safe society, beginners still struggle to understand programming basics, whereas experienced programmers consider testing code as an unnecessary, boring chore. The situation will improve when, instead of asking students to write hypothetical code or test cases, one challenges them to find and fix bugs deliberately injected in real, executable code. Since 2020, we have been developing educational artifacts needed to test this radically new hypothesis, including a web-based bug-hunting game for standalone code, and small-scale cyber-physical systems (a self-driving car and a smart home), controlled by fault-seeded embedded software. We deployed the proposed approach and artifacts in the following settings: a software testing course for 300 computer science students, an exam for 250 economics students enrolled in an introductory Python course, and a software testing refresher workshop for 80 alumni of an IT retraining programme. Evaluations based on surveys with Likert-scale and open questions showed that a fault-based, active-learning approach (1) increases excitement in learning and (2) offers a more adequate way to assess students' skills, compared to the traditional pen-and-paper or MC exams. Future work includes equalizing the difficulty level of injected bugs and adding other gaming elements, such as badges, scoreboards, automated grading and adaptive feedback. While we realize that more rigorous qualitative and quantitative evaluations will be needed to confirm the generalizability of our approach, we are confident in its potential to contribute to making future professionals better prepared to engineer the high-quality, safe software we all can rely on.