Software Quality and Quality Assurance

Why Smarter. Smarter has thousands of unit tests, a coverage target of 90% for each Django app, pre-commit hooks for formatting, linting, spelling and security, conventional commits checked by commitlint, automated semantic releases, and GitHub Actions for tests, builds and deployments. Students see a complete quality process that already works, rather than assembling one from fragments.

Look at. .pre-commit-config.yaml, .github/workflows/, and any app’s tests/ folder.

Read. Unit Testing, CI/CD, Semantic Versioning Guide, ADR 013 on testing, ADR 028 on code quality.

Exercises.

• Run make coverage for one Django app, find its least covered module, and raise its coverage with meaningful tests.

• Introduce a deliberate bug, and see which tests, hooks and CI jobs catch it, and which do not.

• Fork the repository, and get the test.yml workflow passing on the fork. Use it as an autograder for later assignments.

Course plans. Three complete, ready-to-teach plans, each with a schedule, graded assignments and rubrics, two capstone projects, recommended texts, further study and technical prerequisites. See Course Formats and Grading for what the formats have in common.

• Classroom bootcamp: 8 hours
• Two-week online course: 6 hours
• Four-week online course: 12 hours

See the Smarter Instructor Guide to install Smarter and set up a class.