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Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons

Open Access. Powered by Scholars. Published by Universities.®

2008

California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo

Pedagogy

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Full-Text Articles in Physical Sciences and Mathematics

A Survey Of Evidence For Test-Driven Development In Academia, Chetan Desai, David S. Janzen, Kyle Savage Jun 2008

A Survey Of Evidence For Test-Driven Development In Academia, Chetan Desai, David S. Janzen, Kyle Savage

Computer Science and Software Engineering

University professors traditionally struggle to incorporate software testing into their course curriculum. Worries include double-grading for correctness of both source and test code and finding time to teach testing as a topic. Test-driven 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.


Test-Driven Learning In Early Programming Courses, David S. Janzen, Hossein Saiedian Mar 2008

Test-Driven Learning In Early Programming Courses, David S. Janzen, Hossein Saiedian

Computer Science and Software Engineering

Coercing new programmers to adopt disciplined development practices such as thorough unit testing is a challenging endeavor. Test-driven development (TDD) has been proposed as a solution to improve both software design and testing. Test-driven learning (TDL) has been proposed as a pedagogical approach for teaching TDD without imposing significant additional instruction time. This research evaluates the effects of students using a test-first (TDD) versus test-last approach in early programming courses, and considers the use of TDL on a limited basis in CS1 and CS2. Software testing, programmer productivity, programmer performance, and programmer opinions are compared between test-first and test-last programming …