Recently, the list of “Excellent Undergraduate Courses” at the University of Chinese Academy of Sciences (UCAS) for 2023 was announced. The elective course “Software Testing and Analysis,” offered by the Institute of Software, was selected among the outstanding courses.
Since the autumn semester of 2017, “Software Testing and Analysis” has been open to senior undergraduate students (third and fourth year). Although it is an elective course in the field of computer software, it is not limited to students of any specific major. The course emphasizes practical training, enabling students to master commonly used testing methods in real-world application scenarios, understand fundamental program analysis techniques, and apply one or two advanced automated tools for program analysis and testing to solve real-world problems. The course features engaging projects such as Gödel encoders, game pathfinding algorithms, house price calculators, and popular open-source projects on GitHub as testing subjects, helping students apply classroom knowledge and experience the real process of bug discovery. The course syllabus also received the “Excellent Undergraduate Syllabus” award from the Beijing Municipal Education Commission.
The teaching team consists of Dr. Jun Yan, Dr. Jian Zhang, and Dr. Jiwei Yan, all members of the SQuARE research group from the Software Engineering Technology R&D Center and the State Key Laboratory of Computer Science at the Institute of Software. The team has long been engaged in research and teaching in the field of program analysis and testing. In 2023, they were honored with the “Lingyan Award Silver Award · Zhenchi Award” by UCAS.