Towards the Role of Test Design in Programming Assignments

Software testing can be very helpful to students if adopted in programming assignments throughout the Computer Science curriculum. Many testing practices involve students writing their own test cases. This approach implies that students are responsible for the test design task while performing the t...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Proceedings / Conference on Software Engineering Education & Training pp. 170 - 179
Main Authors: Passos Scatalon, Lilian, Marques Prates, Jorge, de Souza, Draylson Micael, Barbosa, Ellen Francine, Garcia, Rogerio Eduardo
Format: Conference Proceeding
Language:English
Published: IEEE 01.11.2017
Subjects:
Instructor-provided Tests
Programming Assignments
Programming profession
Software
Software testing
Student-written Tests
Test Design
Writing
ISSN:2377-570X
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Summary:Software testing can be very helpful to students if adopted in programming assignments throughout the Computer Science curriculum. Many testing practices involve students writing their own test cases. This approach implies that students are responsible for the test design task while performing the test activity. On the other hand, some testing practices follow the opposite approach of providing ready-made test cases, so students only need to execute and evaluate test results for their solution code. In this paper, we investigated the effect of test design in student programming performance. We conducted an experiment comparing two different testing approaches during programming assignments: student-written and instructor-provided test cases. We also assessed students' perceptions of this subject by means of a survey. Results suggest that when students are responsible for test design, i.e. when they write their own test cases, they perform better in programming assignments.
ISSN:2377-570X
DOI:10.1109/CSEET.2017.34