CAST 2013

Imagine that you have a group of students, between the ages of 16-­24. Imagine that these students have traditionally come from backgrounds and environments where technology and science has not been a prominent factor in their lives. Now imagine an initiative aimed at helping those same students being given an opportunity to participate in an internship program where they test software. What would you want to have them learn? How quickly? In what format? What can we do to have these interns be both excited about what they learn, and want to carry that knowledge forward as a career?


Actually, we don’t have to imagine. This program exists, and is happening now. The program is called SummerQAmp, and the participants are 16-­24 year old students, many from non  technical backgrounds, looking to develop skills towards software testing and quality assurance. AST and the Education Special Interest group took the lead in working with the SummerQAmp program to develop the training materials. We are, right now, actively creating the materials to be used for 2013. Through numerous revisions, a lot of collaboration, and comparing notes with many software testing professionals, we sought to answer one over-­arching question...“What did we wish we knew about software testing when we were younger?”


This talk looks to share the decisions we made, the materials we chose to use, the questions we asked and the answers we found, as well as both the positive and negative feedback we received in the process. Our hope is that these materials can be used as a model to help teach the next generation of software testers, and go beyond just the SummerQAmp participants.