Exploring students' sensemaking of test case design. An initial study

Testing is the most used process to assure software systems quality. With increasing complexity of software, testing is getting more important. Testing is an intellectual activity that needs to allocate multiple cognitive resources in students, making it a challenging topic to teach in computer science programs. We advocate that testing is both model-based and exploratory, meaning that we can only make useful test models for test case design once we have made enough sense about the testing problem. The latter can only be achieved through exploring, i.e. questioning, studying, observing and inferring. In this paper, we present an initial diagnostic study to understand the sensemaking used by students while creating test models. We found indications of four different approaches used by students when modelling test cases. A plan for further research is presented on how to improve teaching by taking into account the student's sensemaking approaches.