Improving education in programming

Our society heavily depends on software in almost every area of life, ranging from social-media apps installed on millions of mobile devices up to life-critical software in the automotive or avionic sector. Because we are so dependent on software, it is important that it functions correctly, can be maintained and, because it is used in many different contexts and operated by humans, is robust. Unfortunately, this is not the reality. Although tools and techniques exist to improve software quality, today's programmers seem reluctant to use them.

To remedy this we need to redesign the curriculum for software engineering and general computer science studies, and put more focus on quality assurance and software testing early on. The Erasmus+ Project QPED (Quality-focused Programming Education) will create new course material and a toolkit to achieve this.

The new course material will put emphasis on proper testing as early in the education as possible, to foster a quality-awareness in students that goes beyond functional correctness as demonstrated by testing; they will also start thinking about better readable and more robust code.

To ensure that testing and paying attention to code quality is not only taught early, but also performed by students from the beginning, we will provide a toolkit that can automatically provide feedback on the quality of the code produced by students. It will support the most common object-oriented and imperative programming languages, such as Java, Python and C.

The toolkit and all material will be provided free of charge and can be used inside the Quarterfall learning platform.