Integrated Teaching of Programming Foundations and Software Testing

Author(s)

Camila Kozlowski Della Corte

• Document type: Master's Dissertation
• Press: São Carlos.
• Institution: Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Instituto de Ciências Matemáticas e de Computação (ICMC/SB)
• Defense date: 2006-04-26

Examining board members

José Carlos Maldonado; Fernanda Cláudia Alves Campos; Renata Pontin de Mattos Fortes

• Advisor: José Carlos Maldonado

Abstract

The teaching of fundamentals of programming and software testing is not trivial. Many attempts have been investigated in order to reduce the problems associated to this activity. One of these initiatives is the teaching of basic concepts and techniques of programming in conjunction with software testing in introductory courses of the Computer Science. In this sense, this work aims at providing mechanisms to the integrated teaching of fundamentals of OO programming and software testing. To achieve this goal, we developed an integrated educational module of fundamentals of OO programming and software testing, using an integrated approach to model the educational contents. We focus on conceptual, instructional and didactic modeling of the knowledge domains. Furthermore, an open source Web-based environment, named ProgTest, was also developed for the submission and evaluation of practical assignments to the students. The environment was integrated with testing tools, so the evaluation of the assignments is performed based on testing activities. The assignments and the results are evaluated based on the uniform standards in terms of consistence, efficacy and efficiency. The professors can have their workload reduced with this environment, once the system automatically evaluates both the code of the assignment as well as its test cases. (AU)