Abstract
Grading student assignments and projects in software development courses is a time-consuming task. The lecturer has to download individually each assignment, compile it and manually check that the implementation satisfies the requirements. In addition, the students would like to get early feedback on their solutions, not only as guidelines on whether their solution meets the expectations of the lecturers, but also a way to estimate the current number of points their solution deserves. In this work, we propose the use of the test-driven development process as an approach to both guide the students during the implementation of their projects and as a way to speed up and make the grading process more scalable. Furthermore, we show how we take advantage of community-based software development tools such as GitHub to support our approach. We evaluate the proposed approach by applying it to an academic course for developing web applications. The results show that the approach reduces the grading effort by 60% and that the early feedback it provides was appreciated by students.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Beck, K.: Test-Driven Development: By Example. Addison-Wesley, Boston (2003)
Cai, Y.-Z., Tsai, M.-H.: Improving programming education quality with automatic grading system. In: Rønningsbakk, L., Wu, T.-T., Sandnes, F.E., Huang, Y.-M. (eds.) ICITL 2019. LNCS, vol. 11937, pp. 207–215. Springer, Cham (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35343-8_22
Tran, C.H., Truscan, D., Ahmad, T.: Applying test-driven development to evaluating student projects. In: 6th International Conference on Higher Education Advances (HEAd’2020) 2020
Edwards, S.: Using test-driven development in the classroom: providing students with automatic, concrete feedback on performance. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Education and Information Systems: Technologies and Applications EISTA, Vol. 3 (2003a). http://web-cat.org/publications/Edwards-EISTA03.pdf
Edwards, S.H.: Rethinking computer science education from a test-first perspective. In: Companion of the 18th Annual ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications - OOPSLA 2003 (2003b). https://doi.org/10.1145/949344.949390
Fielding, R., Reschke, J.: Hypertext transfer protocol (HTTP/1.1): message syntax and routing. RFC 7230 (2014)
George, B., Williams, L.: A Structured Experiment of Test-Driven Development. Inf. Softw. Technol. 46(5), 337–342 (2004)
Holovaty, A., Kaplan-Moss, J.: The definitive guide to django (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4302-1937-8
IBM. Test-driven development (n.d). https://ibm.com/garage/method/practices/code/practice_test_driven_development/. Accessed 20 Apr 2020
Janzen, D.S., Saiedian, H.: Test-driven learning. In: Proceedings of the 37th SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education - SIGCSE 2006 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1145/1121341.1121419
Krause, J.: HTML: hypertext markup language. Introducing Web Development, pp. 39–63. Apress, Berkeley, CA (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-2499-1_3
Pilla, M.L.: Teaching computer architectures through automatically corrected projects: preliminary results. Int. J. Comput. Archit. Educ. 6(1), 62–67 (2017)
Guido van, R., Hettinger, R., Coghlan, N., Diedrich, J., Beazley, D., Mertz, D.: The python programming language. Prentice Hall Open Source Software Development Series. Prentice Hall PTR (2008)
Shklar, L., Rosen, R.: Web Application Architecture: Principles, Protocols and Practices. Wiley, Hoboken (2003)
Spinellis, D.: Version control systems. IEEE Softw. 22(5), 108–109 (2005)
Acknowledgements
This work has received partial funding from the Electronic Component Systems for European Leadership Joint Undertaking under grant agreement No 737494. This Joint Undertaking receives support from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme and Sweden, France, Spain, Italy, Finland, the Czech Republic.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Truscan, D., Ahmad, T., Tran, C.H. (2020). Applying Test-Driven Development for Improved Feedback and Automation of Grading in Academic Courses on Software Development. In: Bruel, JM., Capozucca, A., Mazzara, M., Meyer, B., Naumchev, A., Sadovykh, A. (eds) Frontiers in Software Engineering Education. FISEE 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12271. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57663-9_20
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-57663-9_20
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-57662-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-57663-9
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)