A review of Coleman College's / Coleman University's CIS program, part 5

7/6/09 UPDATE: Coleman College is now known as Coleman University - this review was written for their classes that I took in 2005-2006, so some things in their curriculum may have changed since then.

So I've covered mods 1 through 4 of Coleman College's core Computer Information Systems program.

Mod 5 for me was Software Testing and Visual Basic 1. I'm not sure if those are the actual names of the courses in the Coleman College catalog, but that's what we covered. Software testing wasn't really anything exciting - we learned the terminology like black box vs white box, different ways and methods of testing (load testing, acceptance testing, equivalence partitioning, etc.) and thinking (having the right mindset to go about testing and debugging a problem), and just the fact that it's impossible to test everything, bugs follow bugs (where you find one, you'll probably find another related to it), etc. Just a lot of conceptual stuff.

The reason they do Software Testing and VB in the same mod is because the application that you develop in VB (.NET) is (crap, I can't remember the specific terminology they used for it) a GUI application where your user can do things (click on the wrong things, etc) that you wouldn't normally expect them to do. I don't really know why software testing was the 8 unit class this mod when we spent more time in VB.

So in VB1, we made an application that would store customer information into a text file (later on in VB2, it would get more in-depth and use a database). We started off small, not saving any information, just being able to enter it, update it, and delete it. And then we would go around and try to break each other's programs to see how much we learned in software testing.

VB is really easy to learn, but can be used for complex applications. Overall, this was a very easy mod. I really loved all of the lab time that we got to work on our VB applications. The less lecture, the more hands on the better - I learn a lot better that way.

Here are the links to all of the parts: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6, Part 7, more thoughts