Helping Students Test Programs That Have Graphical User Interfaces
Matthew Thornton, Stephen H. Edwards, Roy Patrick Tan
Within computer science education, many educators
are incorporating software testing activities into regular
programming assignments. Tools like JUnit and
its relatives make software testing tasks much easier,
bringing them into the realm of even introductory students.
At the same time, many introductory programming
courses are now including graphical interfaces
as part of student assignments to improve student
interest and engagement. Unfortunately, writing
software tests for programs that have significant
graphical user interfaces is beyond the skills of typical
students (and many educators). This paper presents
initial work at combining educationally oriented and
open-source tools to create an infrastructure for writing
tests for Java programs that have graphical user interfaces.
Critically, these tools are intended to be appropriate
for introductory (CS1/CS2) student use, and
to dovetail with current teaching approaches that incorporate
software testing in programming assignments.
We also include in our findings our proposed
approach to evaluating our techniques. Full Text
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