Abstract: University professors traditionally struggle to incorporate software testing into their course curriculum. Worries include doublegrading for correctness of both source and test code and finding time to teach testing as a topic. Testdriven development (TDD) has been suggested as a possible solution to improve student software testing skills and to realize the benefits of testing. According to most existing studies, TDD improves software quality and student productivity. This paper surveys the current state of TDD experiments conducted exclusively at universities. Similar surveys compare experiments in both the classroom and industry, but none have focused strictly on academia. 1.

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.

Many academic and industry professionals have called for more testing in computer science curricula. Test-driven development (TDD) has been proposed as a solution to improve testing in academia. This paper demonstrates how TDD can be integrated into existing course materials without reducing topic coverage. Two controlled experiments were conducted in a CS1/CS2 course in Winter 2008. Following a test-driven learning approach, unit testing was introduced at the beginning of the course and reinforced through example. Results indicate that while student work loads may increase with the incorporation of TDD, students are able to successfully develop unit tests while learning to program.

We describe the preliminary construction of a web-based tool for test-driven learning in the first weeks of programming. We discuss obstacles to test-driven learning — both pragmatic and ideological — and describe the ways that we believe our tool overcomes these obstacles.

Many academic and industry professionals have called for more testing in computer science curricula. Test-driven development (TDD) has been proposed as a solution to improve testing in academia. This paper demonstrates how TDD can be integrated into existing course materials without reducing topic coverage. Two controlled experiments were conducted in a CS1/CS2 course in Winter 2008. Following a test-driven learning approach, unit testing was introduced at the beginning of the course and reinforced through example. Results indicate that while student work loads may increase with the incorporation of TDD, students are able to successfully develop unit tests while learning to program.

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.

Test-Driven Development (TDD) is an agile development process wherein automated tests are created before production code is designed or constructed in short, rapid iterations. This paper discusses an experiment conducted with undergraduate students in a year-long software engineering capstone course. In this course the students designed, implemented, deployed, and maintained a software system to meet the requirements of an industry sponsor who served as the customer. The course followed an incremental process in which features were added incrementally under the direction of the industry sponsor and the professor. The fourteen students observed in the study were divided into three teams. Among the three teams were two experimental groups. One group consisted of two teams that applied a Test-First (TDD) methodology, while a control group applied a traditional Test-Last methodology. Unlike Test-First, the tests in Test-Last are written after the design and construction of the production code being tested. Results from this experiment differ from many previous studies. In particular, the Test-Last team was actually more productive and wrote more tests than their Test-First counterparts. Anecdotal evidence suggests that factors other than development approach such as individual ambition and team motivation may have more affect than the development approach applied. Although more students indicated a preference for the Test-First approach, concerns regarding learning and applying TDD with unfamiliar technologies are noted.

Test-driven development (TDD) has been shown to reduce defects and to lead to better code, but can it help beginning students learn basic programming topics, specifically arrays? We performed a controlled experiment where we taught arrays to two CS0 classes, one using WebIDE, an intelligent tutoring system that enforced the use of Test-Driven Learning (TDL) methods, and one using more traditional static methods and a development environment that instructed, but did not enforce the use of TDD. Students who used the TDL approach with WebIDE performed significantly better in assessments and had significantly higher opinions of their experiences than students who used traditional methods and tools.