Java IO and testing made simple

Proulx, Viera K.; Rasala, Richard

doi:10.1145/1028174.971358

“…The two texts that use testing throughout do not provide examples of tests, nor do they provide a support for running the tests -or for reporting the test results 1 . A survey of recent papers on computer science education shows a number of attempts to include testing in introductory object-oriented programming instruction [4,5,8,9,10,11,13,15,16,17,18]. Most of them rely on JUnit, a testing environment designed for a professional programmer.…”

Section: Test Driven Design: Industry Vs Teachingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Test-driven design for introductory OO programming

Proulx

¹

2009

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Test-Driven Design (TDD) has been shown to increase the productivity of programming teams and improve the quality of the code they produce. However, most of the introductory curricula provide no introduction to test design, no support for defining the tests, and do not insist on a comprehensive test coverage that is the driving force of the TDD.This paper presents a curriculum, pedagogy, and the software support for introductory object-oriented program design that uses the TDD consistently from the very beginning. The testing software does not increase the program complexity and is designed to work with the simplest programs. It has been used by hundreds of students at several colleges and is freely available on the web.Our experiences show that besides improving the quality of code students produce, TDD combined with the noviceappropriate test libraries reinforces students' understanding of the object oriented program design.

show abstract

“…Over the past several years a number of papers reported on testing in the introductory object-oriented programming instruction [9,10,14,15,17,20,27,28,29,30,36,37,39,40]. A majority of papers investigates students' experiences with designing tests using JUnit, a testing environment designed for a professional programmer.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Unit test support for Java via reflection and annotations

Proulx

¹

,

Jossey

²

2009

Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Principles and Practice of Programming in Java

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Novice Java programmers face great difficulties when learning to design unit tests for any nontrivial cases. Deciding whether the result of a method, or the effect the method produced represents the expected result one must understand the difference between equality based on the values an object represents versus the reference equality (identity) -and be able to define the correct equals method.We describe the tester library that supports test design, evaluation, and reporting of the results in the manner that supports a novice programmer. The library uses Java reflection and annotation to compare any two data items (primitive types or objects) by the value they represent, produces report where the expected and actual values are prettyprinted, and a failed test report includes a link to the failed test.The library has been used in classrooms and is used daily in our program design.

show abstract

Test-driven design for introductory OO programming

Proulx

¹

2009

Proceedings of the 40th ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Test-Driven Design (TDD) has been shown to increase the productivity of programming teams and improve the quality of the code they produce. However, most of the introductory curricula provide no introduction to test design, no support for defining the tests, and do not insist on a comprehensive test coverage that is the driving force of the TDD.This paper presents a curriculum, pedagogy, and the software support for introductory object-oriented program design that uses the TDD consistently from the very beginning. The testing software does not increase the program complexity and is designed to work with the simplest programs. It has been used by hundreds of students at several colleges and is freely available on the web.Our experiences show that besides improving the quality of code students produce, TDD combined with the noviceappropriate test libraries reinforces students' understanding of the object oriented program design.

show abstract

Java IO and testing made simple

Cited by 4 publications

References 11 publications

Test-driven design for introductory OO programming

Test-driven design for introductory OO programming

Unit test support for Java via reflection and annotations

Test-driven design for introductory OO programming

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About