Software testing continues to be the primary approach used in practice to ensure the development of high-quality software. However, students graduating with a bachelor’s or a master’s degree in computer science or software engineering may not be properly trained for doing software testing cost-effectively.

To increase the awareness of this problem, give students a taste of how software testing may be conducted and how to measure the quality of the test cases used for testing a program, an International Contest on Software Testing (ICST) has been an annual event for the last several years.

On March 30, 2024, Professor W. Eric Wong (director of software engineering) and Professor Jey Veerasamy (director of the Center for Computer Science Education & Outreach) served as organizers for this year’s event. In addition to UTD’s Department of Computer Science, the contest was co-sponsored by the Technical Committee on System and Software Assurance of the IEEE Reliability Society and the Dallas chapter of the IEEE Reliability Society.

The contest was held in a “hybrid mode” where contestants based in Dallas-Fort Worth area participated in-person at UTD, while those from other geographic regions (such as Austria, India, Brazil, Japan, China and Taiwan) joined online. More than 200 students from seven different countries registered/attended the contest. Before attending the contest, they were required to watch a video and complete a practice test.

During the contest, each contestant worked independently to design a suite of test cases with specific input values based on the source code and other requirements to test multiple Java programs. The quality of their test cases was measured by the code coverage and mutation score achieved. More details can be found on the ICST website.

A participation certificate was presented to every contestant. Additionally, the first place winner received a $300 prize, the second place winner received a $200 prize, the third to fifth place winners each won a $100 prize. Sixth through eighth place finishers earned a $75 prize, and the ninth through 11^th place finishers earned a $50 prize. 

The organizers would like to thank Mooctest Inc. for providing the MoocTest online testing platform for the contest and Venky Vadlamani with DMLabs for donating to the winners’ awards. The organizers would also like to give special acknowledgment to Professor Zhenyu Chen of the Software Institute at Nanjing University, Mr. Gaolei Yi of Nanjing University and Professor John Cole, Mr. Zizhao Chen, and Mr. Kevin Hsu, all from the UTD computer science department for their efforts in making this contest so successful.