Automated Software Testing in Educational Environment: A Design of Testing Framework for Extreme Programming

Abstract

Automation of the testing process is a novel approach in software engineering that was proposed in the incremental Extreme Programming (XP) methodology. Test driven development process such as XP follows a core practice of ‘Test first’; where developers are supposed to write test cases, in particular for unit testing, before they actually start coding the application increment. Applying the principle of test driven development has a positive impact on the way students develop their assignments. Students usually relay on trail-and-error approach in performing unit and functional testing. The present paper discusses how automated software testing in educational environment could be implemented and provides a testing framework for extreme programming that students and educators can share. The paper presents a web-based testing framework system to help students systematically run and track their test cases. The system acts as an integration-testing machine where students upload the latest code of both the application increment and the associated test cases. The system runs the test suite comprising all previously uploaded test cases together with the newly uploaded test cases; the objective being to make sure the newly uploaded test cases and application increment do not affect previously successfully integrated application increments. Students following XP will save the time it takes to run each test individually. Moreover, the testing framework will help students to easily create test cases by following the standards provided by the framework.