Title: A design-aware test code approach for code writing problem in Java programming learning assistant system

Authors: Khin Khin Zaw; Nobuo Funabiki

Addresses: Graduate School of Natural Science and Technology, Okayama University, Okayama, Japan ' Graduate School of Natural Science and Technology, Okayama University, Okayama, Japan

Abstract: To advance Java programming educations, we have developed the web-based Java programming learning assistant system (JPLAS) that provides the code writing problem. This problem asks a student to write a source code for a given assignment, where the correctness is verified by running the test code on JUnit. In this paper, we propose a design-aware test code approach for the code writing problem. The design-aware test code tests any important method in the model source code that has the advisable design for the assignment. Thus, by writing a code that can pass it, a student is expected to implement the code with the proper classes/methods in the model code. In evaluations of the proposal, all the students could complete highly qualitative codes for five graph algorithms using the design-aware test codes, where the code quality metrics were measured by metrics plugin for Eclipse.

Keywords: Java programming learning assistant system; JPLAS; design-aware test code; JUnit; metric plugin; breadth-first-search; BFS.

DOI: 10.1504/IJSSC.2017.089006

International Journal of Space-Based and Situated Computing, 2017 Vol.7 No.3, pp.145 - 154

Received: 27 Jun 2017
Accepted: 29 Sep 2017

Published online: 03 Jan 2018 *

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