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Marking programming assignments in programming courses involves a lot of work: each program must be tested, the source code must be read and evaluated, etc. With the large classes encountered nowadays, the feedback provided to students through marking is thus rather limited, and often late. Tools providing support for marking programming assignments do exist, ranging from support for administrative aspects through automation of program testing or support for source code evaluation based on metrics. In this paper, we introduce a tool, called Oto, that provides support for submission and marking of assignments. Oto aims at reducing the workload associated with the marking task. Oto also aims at providing timely feedback to the students, including feedback before the final submission. Furthermore, the tool has been designed to be generic and extensible, so that the marking process for a specific assignment can easily be customized and the tool can be extended with various marking components (modules) that allows it to deal with various aspects of marking (testing, style, structure, etc.) and with programs written in various programming languages. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Modeling the behavior of a system under development has proven to be a very effective way to ensure that it will be constructed correctly. However, building up this model is a difficult task that requires a significant time investment in and a high level of expertise. Consequently, incremental approaches that construct a system model from partial behavioral descriptions have been widely adopted. The challenge in such approaches lies in finding both the adequate behavioral formalism that fits the needs of the analyst as well as a formal composition mechanism that facilitates the generation of the expected behavioral model and produces a verifiable model. Within this framework, use case approaches have been also accepted in industry because they make the process of requirement elicitation simpler. Their main shortcoming is their lack of formalization, which makes validation difficult. In this paper, we propose a formal approach for composing system behaviors where partial system behaviors are defined as finite state automata. Each automaton represents a use case that describes a certain system concern, hence the name use case automata (UCA). The composition of different UCAs could be performed with respect to a set of states or transitions specified by the analyst, using certain composition operators. Each of these operators has a precise semantics, which is defined by how the composition is performed. The formalization of use case composition is based on label matching between the UCAs to be composed. Our approach is fully automated and provides the advantage of generating a UCA that meets the intended behavior without unexpected scenarios. Finally, we present the UMACT tool, which implements our composition approach.

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