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Volume 4 Issue 1 March 2006
Using Software Testing Techniques for Efficient Handling of Programming Exercises in an E-Learning Platform
Joachim Schwieren, Gottfried Vossen and Peter Westerkamp
University of Muenster, Germany
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e-Learning has become a major field of interest in recent years, and multiple approaches and solutions have been developed. A typical form of e-learning applications comprises exercise submission and assessment systems that allow students to work on assignments when and where they want (i.e., dislocated, asynchronous work). In undergraduate and basic computer science and programming courses, programming exercises are widely used. These courses tend to have a very large number of participants which leads to several problems when the submitted exercises have to be corrected and graded by tutors. However, there is still no efficient way for supporting tutors in correcting these exercises, as experience has shown that correction (and, beyond that, automatic grading) is difficult and most of all very time consuming.
In this paper we present an enhancement of the xLx platform developed at the University of Muenster to efficiently support tutors in handling Java programming exercises electronically. The new component is based on concepts of automatic static and dynamic testing approaches, well known from software engineering. It provides an automatic pre-correction of submitted solutions which allows the definition of a certain level of quality and/or functionality that the submitted solutions will have to fulfil in order to be accepted by the system. In addition, a tutor is able to annotate solutions manually, by adding comments that are associated with the source code of the solution in an intelligent way. Static tests are based on a compilation of the sources to find syntactical errors as well as verifying dependencies between the submitted software components (i.e. Java classes). In addition to that dynamic tests use test cases defined by tutors during the creation of the exercises and have to be executed correctly on the solutions in order to receive credits for the exercises.
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