Education

Dans un contexte où le développement logiciel évolue rapidement, souvent sous l’impulsion du monde industriel, il est essentiel pour les institutions d’enseignement supérieur de maintenir un lien étroit avec les pratiques professionnelles. Cette connexion permet d’adapter les programmes de formation aux réalités du terrain et de garantir la pertinence des compétences transmises aux étudiant·e·s.

This week, two members of our team are attending the IEEE International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation (ICST 2025) in Naples, Italy. On Monday, Balfroid Martin took the stage to share research conducted by Manon Galloy, a SNAILee who defended her master’s thesis in 2024. The focus of their presentation was on a novel technique known as SelfBehave, aimed at synthesizing user stories, which was featured during the A-MOST workshop.

It’s time for the January exams. Three years ago, my colleague Benoît Vanderose and I created a verification and validation course for the MSc in Software Engineering students. From the start, we both thought we needed a practical exam where students actually perform V&V tasks. So, for our exam, students have to analyze a codebase, read SonarQube reports, refactor code, correct bugs, and write tests. This was quite unusual for them (most courses are evaluated using projects or paper exams), and the students’ reaction three years ago was, let’s say, interesting.

How do you get 4th graders (16yo.) to understand software engineering in 1h30? That’s the challenge we (Jérôme Maquoi, Benoît Vanderose and Xavier Devroey) set ourselves on Thursday April 25, 2024. Rather than making them write code, we chose another route: get them to build a 16-floors tower of wooden blocks in under 32 minutes with constraints similar to a software development team in full rush. 😁

The widespread digitalization of society and the increasing complexity of software make it essential to develop high-quality software testing suites. In recent years, several techniques for learning software testing have been developed, including techniques based on mutation testing. At the same time, the recent performance of language models in both text comprehension and generation, as well as code generation, makes them potential candidates for assisting students in learning how to develop tests. To confirm this, an experiment was carried out with students with little experience in software testing, comparing the results obtained by some students using a report from a classic mutation testing tool and a report augmented with hints generated by a language model. The results seem promising since the augmented reports improved the mutation score and mutant coverage within the group more generally than the other reports. In addition, the augmented reports seem to have been most effective in testing methods for modifying and retrieving private variable values.

On July 4, the faculty’s teaching staff participated in a half-day training session on gender questions and representations in Computer Science courses. This training is part of the results of the research project Gender Equals Future: 011 for IT, in which Interface3.Namur, Form@Nam and the University of Namur are partners. It was an opportunity to take a closer look at the situation, based on figures taken from the annual report on gender equality at the University of Namur (2020-2021), and to break down a few clichés about women’s involvement in computer science studies and the academic world. Participants were also introduced to the difference between the concepts of sex and gender, common cognitive biases, and stereotypes. The training ended with a brainstorming session on some practical actions to be implemented at the faculty.