Prof. CI: Employing Continuous Integration Services and Github Workflows to Teach Test-driven Development

TL;DR

This paper introduces Prof. CI, a novel online teaching approach that uses real-world continuous integration tools and Github workflows to teach test-driven development, enhancing practical skills and motivation among students.

Contribution

The paper presents a new scalable method for teaching TDD by integrating CI services and Github workflows into online programming courses, bridging the gap between MOOCs and real-world development tools.

Findings

Increased student motivation to write tests.

Positive student feedback on using real CI tools.

Effective application in a pilot with 30 students.

Abstract

Teaching programming using Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) is gaining popularity due to their scalability and efficiency of knowledge distribution. However, participating in these courses usually means fully committing to the supplied programming environment in the browser. While this allows a consistent and controllable setup, learners do not gain experience with actual development tools, such as local code editors, testing frameworks, issue trackers or continuous integration (CI) services, which is critical for subsequent real-world projects. Furthermore, the tests for the functionality that is to be developed are oftentimes already available in MOOCs and simply need to be executed, leading to less involvement with developing appropriate tests. In order to tackle these issues while maintaining a high degree of automation and scalability, we developed Prof. CI, a novel approach to conducting online exercises. Prof. CI leverages the existing automation infrastructure that developers use daily, i.e. CI services and Github workflows, to teach test-driven development (TDD) practices. Participants work on their own repositories in Github and receive feedback and new challenges from the CI server when they push their code. We have successfully applied this approach in a pilot project with 30 undergraduate students learning the Ruby on Rails web development framework. Our evaluation shows that the exercise effectively increased students' motivation to write tests for their code. We also present the results of participant surveys, students' experiences and teachers' observations.