Test Design Curriculum

This workshop is sponsored by two NSF DUE CCLI grants:

Integrating Test Design into Computing Curriculum from the Beginning Grant # 0920182

Redesigning Introductory Computing: The Design Discipline Grant # 00618543

The goals of this workshop is to lean how to incorporate a systematic approach to sofware testing into curriculum starting from the beginning.

One of the key premisses is to make sure that the curriculum is supported by testing software that makes test design, evaluation, and reporting accessible to the programmer at his/her current level of knowledge of programming. Our goal is to provide such tools through our tester library.

The workshop is aimed at all college instructors with focus on those invlolved with the first year introduction to programming. Prior exposure to functional style of prgramming is strongly recommended.

Workshop plans

• Day 1: Unit test design in the absence of mutation.

  • Functional Java and Design of Class Hierarchies
  • Function Objects
  • Designing unit tests for mutation-free programs
  • Tests for inexact values

• Day 2: Unit test design for special cases; Equality

  • Understanding Equality
  • Constructor and Exceptions tests
  • World: interactive games
  • Ranges, one-of values, traversals

• Day 3: Unit test design in the presence of mutation

  • Imperative style: mutating an object, mutating structure
  • Imperative World
  • Tests for complex data structures: Trees, Hash Maps, Sets, Circularity

• Day 4: Comprehensive testing strategies

  • Randomized tests
  • Stress tests
  • Black box testing
  • Usability testing
  • Integration tests

• Day 5: Review, Summary, Pedagogical Pointers

  • Code walks
  • Test coverage
  • Discussion