What is it about?
We invented a role-play game for students learning software testing to play. In small groups, some students pretended to be software for a broken ice-cream machine, and others pretended to be testers. The testers tried to find the bugs in the software by asking questions. This helped students practice software testing in a fun and collaborative way.
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Photo by Andy Hermawan on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Software testing is hard to teach, because it's often seen as boring and tedious. We found that students who played our game became significantly more confident in their software testing skills. They also told us that they enjoyed the game, found it a worthwhile reason to come to class, and that it helped them learn the basics of software testing. They particularly enjoyed that the game let them interact with other students, and that they could practice thinking about software testing without having to actually write code and worry about getting it working.
Perspectives
Seeing students play this game was incredibly fulfilling. We were warned by some colleagues that software testing students would never play an interactive game, and that we'd have no success getting students to talk to each other. In the end, we had trouble getting them to stop!
Dr Charlotte Pierce
Monash University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: There's a Bug in your Ice-cream: Teaching Software Testing with Role-plays, June 2025, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3724363.3729115.
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