Collaborative Development of Educational Modules - E-Infrastructures and Technologies for Lifelong Learning - page 198

Ultimately, open specifications are an important
mechanism to foster aspects of customization,
reusability and adaptability of the educational
products, contributing to better engage the students
in an active learning process.
Aiming at representing open specifications,
HMBS was extended with the idea of DD (Dy-
namically Defined) states and hierarchies of DD-
superstates. In short, all OR substates of a DD
state (OR DD ) are totally connected to each other.
From any substate of a DD state X, we can reach
all other substates of X. For the sake of legibility,
transitions and events are implicitly represented.
A hierarchy of DD-superstates establishes that
leaving a DD state X can active the OR DD states
from the hierarchy of DD-superstates of X. Both
mechanisms (DD states and hierarchies of DD-
superstates) help to establish open specifications
since they allow representing all sequences of pre-
sentation in the same didactic model. More detailed
information on DD states and on hierarchies of
DD-superstates can be found in (Barbosa, 2004).
It is important to highlight that everyone
interested in teaching and learning can benefit
from IMA-CID: instructors, domain experts,
content designers, education and training profes-
sionals, and learners as well. The main concern
regarding the IMA-CID application is the need
to be familiar with the structure and execution
semantics of statecharts, what can lead to some
additional costs to initially develop IMA-CID
-based materials. On the other hand, the qual-
ity factors of the produced materials, such as
customization, evolvability, maintainability and
reusability, would increase the long-term benefits
and decrease the overall costs.

foundations, open source methods and technolo-
gies, critical embedded systems, and elementary
materials on mathematics. Particularly, the training
materials produced in the context of two broad
projects have been developed according to them:
(1) QualiPSo Project (Quality Platform for Open
Source Software - www.qualipso.org), funded by
the European Community (IST-FP6-IP-034763);
and (2) INCT-SEC (National Institute of Science
and Technology - Critical Embedded Systems
- www.inct-sec.org), financed by the Brazilian
funding agencies. Both projects bring together
important players from industry and academia.
Next we illustrate the application of SP-DEM
and IMA-CID in the development of SoftTest -
an educational module for software testing. We
chose the testing area since it is one of the most
relevant activities regarding software develop-
ment (Myers et al., 2004) but, at the same time,
it is a difficult topic to learn or teach without the
appropriate supporting mechanisms (Shepard et
al., 2001; Edwards, 2003).

Applying the SP-DEM
Instantiated Process

The SoftTest educational module was developed
according to the instance of SP-DEM previously
discussed. The main aspects regarding the module
development are summarized next.
Basically, most of the learning problems
identified in the software testing domain can be
related to the characterization of: (1) testing goals
and limitations; (2) testing steps and phases; (3)
testing requirements, testing criteria, and testing
tools. So, our learning goal was to foster theo-
retical, empirical and tool specific knowledge by
providing learners with a broad and deep view
of the testing activity fundamentals and of their
practical application by mastering testing tools.
The target audience of SoftTest was graduate
and undergraduate students, as well as profes-
sionals from industry. Although each group of
learners can require a different way for presenting

SOFTTEST: AN EDUCATIONAL
MODULE FOR SOFTWARE TESTING

SP-DEM and IMA-CID have been applied into
the development of educational modules for dif-
ferent domains: software testing, programming