Domain Testing: Divide and Conquer - Testing Education

CONSENT FORM: DOMAIN TESTING EXPERIMENT BY SOWMYA PADMANABHAN
We are seeking your participation in a research project in which we are developing instructional
materials for teaching testing skills. We will use data from this experiment to improve Florida
Tech’s software testing courses and we will publish the results for use by other software testing
teachers and researchers.
If you agree to participate, we may ask you to attend one or more lectures, read materials,
complete practice exercises, and take written tests at various points in the study.
When you do an exercise or take a test, you will fill out an answer sheet. To preserve your
privacy, you will identify yourself on answer sheets with an experimenter-assigned number. You
might review answers written by other students and they might review your answers.
You may be assigned to work on an exercise with another student, and if so, each of you will fill
out your own answer sheet.
The experiment will require several hours of your participation. If you cannot participate for all of
the scheduled hours, please do not begin this experiment. We cannot use partial data and we
cannot compensate you for partial participation.
We will split the experiment into sessions, which will last between 15 and 18 hours.
We estimate that your participation will require sessions of __ hours
each.
Participants in most of the phases of this work will be paid. Some of our colleagues will serve as
volunteers during the exploratory phases of the experiment and will not be paid.
You will be paid $__ for your participation in this study.
You will be paid at the completion of your role in the experiment (all sessions assigned to you).
We can afford to pay you only if you attend all the assigned sessions and complete the required
assignments/exercises/quizzes. We cannot use your data if you skip any session.
If we have to terminate your role in the experiment prematurely because of an error that we made
in running the experiment, we will pay you for the time you have spent in the experiment to date
of termination, at a rate of $10 per hour, rounded up to the nearest whole hour.
Your participation will not subject you to any physical pain or risk. We do not anticipate that you
will be subject to any stress or embarrassment.
We will ask you to fill out one or more questionnaires that give us demographic information
about you and/or that give us insight into how you learn.
Your name will not be recorded on any answer sheet. You will be assigned an anonymous code
number. You will use that code number on your answer sheet. Your responses will be tracked
under that code number, not under your name. Any reports about this research will contain only
data of an anonymous or statistical nature. Your name will not be used.
For auditing purposes, the experimenter will keep a list of all people who participated in the
experiment and the anonymous code assigned to them. That list might be reviewed by the student
experimenter, Sowmya Padmanabhan, the project’s Principal Investigator, Cem Kaner, or by
anyone designated by the Florida Institute of Technology or an agency of the Government of the
United States, including the National Science Foundation, as having such legitimate
administrative interests in the project as analysis of the treatment of the subjects, the legitimacy of
the data, or the financial management of the project. We will file this list in a place we consider