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Educational modules — concise units of study capable of integrating theoretical/practical contents and supporting tools — can be seen as relevant mechanisms to facilitate the student’s apprenticeship. The establishment of processes and modeling approaches should ease the cooperative work to create, reuse and evolve educational modules, taking also into account the impact on the learning process. There are initiatives to address the problem of modeling educational contents, but none of them provides a complete set of features addressing the conceptual, instructional and didactic perspectives. Moreover, these initiatives do not consider a systematic process for developing educational modules. In this work we summarize the main aspects of a standardized process for developing educational modules we have proposed, focusing on the modeling activity for structuring the learning contents. An integrated modeling approach is presented and its application is illustrated by the development of an educational module for the software testing domain. The material produced has been applied and preliminarily evaluated in terms of the student’s attitude toward content, usability and navigational aspects.

Mutation testing, originally proposed to unit testing, has been extended to integration testing with the proposition of the Interface Mutation criterion. In this paper we analyze the results of an experiment comparing two mutation-based testing criteria for unit and integration testing phases: the Mutation Analysis and the Interface Mutation adequacy criteria, respectively. The aim is to investigate how they could be used in a complementary way during the testing activity. We attempt to establish an incremental testing strategy comprising the unit and integration testing phases and guidelines on how to obtain a high mutation score with respect to mutation testing with a lower cost, in terms of the number of mutants generated.

Mutation Testing has been found to be an effective fault revealing criterion. However, its high cost of application, mainly due to the high number of mutants created and the effort to determine the equivalent mutants, has motivated the position of alternative approaches for its application. One of them, named N-Selective Mutation, aims at reducing the number of generated mutants through a reduction on the number of generated mutants through a reduction on the number of the most prevalent mutant operators expecting that would not occur a significant reduction on the effectiveness. Previously, other researchers investigated the N-Selective Mutation in the context of FORTRAN language, for the unit testing. The results showed that it is possible to have a large cost reduction preserving a high mutation score. Recently, the underlying mutation concept has seen explored at the integration testing phase by the proposition of the Interface Mutation criterion. In the same research line, this work investigates the N-Selective Mutation for C programs, considering the unit and the integration testing phases, in the perspective of contributing to the establishment of low-cost, effective mutation-based testing strategies. N-Selective Mutation is also compared with other Selective Mutation criteria as well as with Randomly Selected Mutation.