A Feedback Toolkit and Procedural Guidance for Teaching Thorough Testing

TL;DR

This paper introduces a procedural guidance and a toolkit to enhance teaching of software correctness by providing students with targeted feedback on code quality and testing, aiming to improve their testing skills and understanding.

Contribution

It presents a novel procedural guidance combined with a feedback toolkit that offers customizable, automated feedback on test coverage and code quality for educational purposes.

Findings

Toolkit enables independent feedback on test adequacy

Procedural guidance improves student understanding of testing

Customizable feedback enhances teaching effectiveness

Abstract

Correctness is one of the more important criteria of qualitative software. However, it is often taught in isolation and most students consider it only as an afterthought. They also do not receive sufficient feedback on code quality and tests unless specified in the assignment. To improve this, we developed a procedural guidance that guides students to an implementation with appropriate tests. Furthermore, we have developed a toolkit that students can use to independently get individual feedback on their solution and the adequateness of their tests. A key instrument is a test coverage analysis which allows for teachers to customize the feedback with constructive instructions specific to the current assignment to improve a student's test suite. In this paper, we outline the procedural guidance, explain the working of the feedback toolkit and present a method for using the toolkit in conjunction with the different steps of the procedural guidance.