A gimmick to integrate software testing throughout the curriculum

Goldwasser, Michael H.

doi:10.1145/563517.563446

Cited by 31 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 18 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Shepard, Lamb, and Kelly [2001] make an appeal for educators to teach more testing, but offer little concrete direction. Goldwasser [2002] describes an interesting classroom technique where students submit test cases along with their code. After the due date, all student test suites are run against all student submissions, and extra credit is given both to the strongest survivor and to the most deviously successful test data.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Improving student performance by evaluating how well students test their own programs

Edwards

2003

J. Educ. Resour. Comput.

132

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Students need to learn more software testing skills. This paper presents an approach to teaching software testing in a way that will encourage students to practice testing skills in many classes and give them concrete feedback on their testing performance, without requiring a new course, any new faculty resources, or a significant number of lecture hours in each course where testing will be practiced. The strategy is to give students basic exposure to test-driven development, and then provide an automated tool that will assess student submissions on-demand and provide feedback for improvement. This approach has been demonstrated in an undergraduate programming languages course using a prototype tool. The results have been positive, with students expressing appreciation for the practical benefits of test-driven development on programming assignments. Experimental analysis of student programs shows a 28% reduction in defects per thousand lines of code.

show abstract

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Improving student performance by evaluating how well students test their own programs

Edwards

2003

J. Educ. Resour. Comput.

132

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Educators have examined a variety of assessment integration strategies for computer science courses. For instance, some researchers instruct students to submit their software tests and solutions [19], [23], while others involve students in peer testing [36], [22]. Fraser et al [20] proposed a Code Defenders game that is utilized to engage students' activities in the test suite.…”

Section: ) Software Testing In Educationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Test Smell Detection Tools: A Systematic Mapping Study

Aljedaani¹,

Peruma

Aljohani

et al. 2021

Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

To ensure the quality of a software system, developers perform an activity known as unit testing, where they write code (known as test cases) that verifies the individual software units that make up the system. Like production code, test cases are subject to bad programming practices, known as test smells, that hurt maintenance activities. An essential part of most maintenance activities is program comprehension which involves developers reading the code to understand its behavior to fix issues or update features. In this study, we conduct a controlled experiment with 96 undergraduate computer science students to investigate the impact of two common types of test smells, namely Assertion Roulette and Eager Test, on a student's ability to debug and troubleshoot test case failures. Our findings show that students take longer to correct errors in production code when smells are present in their associated test cases, especially Assertion Roulette. We envision our findings supporting academia in better equipping students with the knowledge and resources in writing and maintaining high-quality test cases. Our experimental materials are available online 1

show abstract

“…With respect to software testing, most prior work on collaborative learning focuses on test input generation, which applies to black box testing but does not extend to richer forms of white box testing. For example, Carrington [3] describes exercises in which students generate test inputs for various software specifications, and Goldwasser [9] describes an approach in which students competitively submit test cases to break each others' code. However, Goldwasser's approach focuses on black-box testing methods, where students explore testing through small-scale programming exercises, such as merging two sorted linked lists.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Using peer review to teach software testing

Smith

Tessler

Kramer

et al. 2012

Proceedings of the Ninth Annual International Conference on International Computing Education Research

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This paper explains how peer review can be used to teach software testing, an important skill that is typically not carefully taught in most programming courses. The goals of such peer review are (1) to frame testing as a fun and competitive activity, (2) to allow students to learn from each other, (3) to demonstrate the importance of testing by uncovering latent bugs in the students' code, and (4) to provide a mechanism for evaluating testing skills. This paper explains how we added peer review to an honors data structure course without significantly reducing its heavy programming load. We evaluate our intervention by summarizing surveys of student attitudes taken throughout the course.

show abstract

A gimmick to integrate software testing throughout the curriculum

Cited by 31 publications

References 18 publications

Improving student performance by evaluating how well students test their own programs

Improving student performance by evaluating how well students test their own programs

Test Smell Detection Tools: A Systematic Mapping Study

Using peer review to teach software testing

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About