Improving student performance by evaluating how well students test their own programs

Students need to learn more software testing skills. This paper presents an approach to teaching software testing in a way that will encourage students to practice testing skills in many classes and give them concrete feedback on their testing performance, without requiring a new course, any new faculty resources, or a significant number of lecture hours in each course where testing will be practiced. The strategy is to give students basic exposure to test-driven development, and then provide an automated tool that will assess student submissions on-demand and provide feedback for improvement. This approach has been demonstrated in an undergraduate programming languages course using a prototype tool. The results have been positive, with students expressing appreciation for the practical benefits of test-driven development on programming assignments. Experimental analysis of student programs shows a 28% reduction in defects per thousand lines of code.