Peer Testing in Software Engineering Projects

Abstract

For the last six years, students in the Software Engineering Project course at the University of Tasmania have undertaken projects in teams of four or five members. Since 1998 peer testing sessions have been conducted in two different formats: paired peer code reviews and group peer inspections. The critique that the testers perform can help the development team to identify problems before assessment hence increasing the quality of the work submitted. The peer testing sessions also provide many different, but valuable, benefits such as serving as milestones, increasing learning, and increasing collaboration between students in different teams.