Creating and Visualizing Test Data from Programming Exercises

Automatic assessment of programming exercises is typically based on testing approach. Most automatic assessment frameworks execute tests and evaluate test results automatically, but the test data generation is not automated. No matter that automatic test data generation techniques and tools are avai...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published in:Informatics in education Vol. 6; no. 1; pp. 81 - 102
Main Author: Ihantola, Petri
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Vilnius Vilniaus Universiteto Leidykla 01.01.2007
Vilnius University Press
Institute of Mathematics and Informatics
Vilnius University
Subjects:
Applied sciences
Assessments
automatic assessment
Computer programs
Computer science
computer science education
Computer science; control theory; systems
Computer systems and distributed systems. User interface
Education
Exact sciences and technology
Format
General aspects
Higher Education
ICT Information and Communications Technologies
Methodology and research technology
Occupational training. Personnel. Work management
Programming
programming exercises
Readers
Software
Software engineering
software visualization
test-data
testing
Tests
Texts
Titanium dioxide
computer science education
programming exercises
software visualization
automatic assessment
testing testdata
Initialization
Automatic programming
JAVA language
Refinement method
test-data
testing
Automatic test
Annotation
Teaching
Test generation
Education
Data visualization
Model checking
Automatic test generation
ISSN:1648-5831, 2335-8971
Online Access:Get full text
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
Description
Summary:Automatic assessment of programming exercises is typically based on testing approach. Most automatic assessment frameworks execute tests and evaluate test results automatically, but the test data generation is not automated. No matter that automatic test data generation techniques and tools are available. We have researched how the Java PathFinder software model checker can be adopted to the specific needs of test data generation in automatic assessment. Practical problems considered are: how to derive test data directly from students’ programs (i.e., without annotation) and how to visualize and how to abstract test data automatically for students? Interesting outcomes of our research are that with minor refinements generalized symbolic execution with lazy initialization (a test data generation algorithm implemented in PathFinder) can be used to construct test data directly from students’ programs without annotation, and that intermediate results of the same algorithm can be used to provide novel visualizations of the test data.
Bibliography:SourceType-Scholarly Journals-1
ObjectType-General Information-1
content type line 14
ObjectType-Article-2
ObjectType-Feature-1
content type line 23
ISSN:1648-5831
2335-8971
DOI:10.15388/infedu.2007.06