Test-Driven Learning with WebIDE

测试驱动开发（Test-driven development，TDD）是一种新的软件开发策略，要求在编写功能代码之前编写自动化单元测试。TDD正在成为一种行业“最佳实践”，它在流行的敏捷软件过程以及更传统的计划驱动过程中都是有益的。尽管业界已经接受TDD，但学术界对TDD的熟悉和理解一直很缓慢。TDD已经进入了一些研究生和高级软件工程课程。在学术界推广TDD的主要障碍和合乎逻辑的下一步是教师教育和资源。该项目致力于通过开发和评估实验室材料以及支持基于Web的集成开发环境（WebIDE），基于测试驱动学习（TDL）方法，为第一年的编程课程简化和加速学术界采用TDD。TDL是一种教授计算机编程的方法，涉及以自动测试的方式通过示例引入和探索新概念。通过提供基于TDD的实验室材料，在学生熟悉的环境（Web）中的超级简单易用的界面上分层，并立即访问，消除了令人沮丧的障碍，使学生能够取得早期的成功，专注于核心编程概念，并掌握初始语言语法。这些实验室可以提高学生的设计和测试技能，因为他们学习传统的CS 1实现技能。超过12项实证研究已经评估了在课堂上使用TDD的有效性。虽然结果并不是结论性的，但这些研究表明，应用TDD的学生和从业者可以对他们的程序更有信心，实现更高的测试覆盖率，缺陷更少，并且编写的程序复杂度明显降低。研究进一步表明，教师可以在不牺牲现有主题的覆盖范围的情况下将TDD纳入其中，学生可以在第一年的编程课程中学习应用TDD，而无需投入更多的时间。换句话说，TDL使人们能够免费教授测试和TDD。

Computer Science (31) Test-driven development (TDD) is a novel software development strategy requiring automated unit tests be written prior to writing functional code. TDD is emerging as an industry "best practice" that is beneficial in popular agile software processes as well as more traditional plan-driven processes. Despite industry acceptance of TDD, the academic community has been slow to become familiar with and understand TDD. TDD has made its way into some graduate and upper-level software engineering courses. The primary hurdles and logical next steps for expanding TDD in academia are teacher education and resources. This project endeavors to ease and speed adoption of TDD in academia by developing and assessing lab materials and a supporting web-based integrated development environment (WebIDE) for first year programming courses, based on the Test-Driven Learning (TDL) approach. TDL is an approach to teaching computer programming that involves introducing and exploring new concepts by example in a test-first manner with automated tests. By providing TDD-based lab materials layered on a super-simple-to-use interface in a context (web) that is familiar to students and immediately accessible, frustrating hurdles are eliminated so students can achieve early successes, focus on core programming concepts, and master initial language syntax. These labs can improve student design and testing skills as they learn traditional CS1 implementation skills. More than a dozen empirical studies have assessed the efficacy of using TDD in the classroom. Although results are not conclusive, these studies have shown that students and practitioners who apply TDD can be more confident about their programs, achieve significantly higher test coverage, have fewer defects, and write significantly less complex programs. Studies have further shown that instructors can incorporate TDL without sacrificing coverage of existing topics, and students can learn to apply TDD in first year programming courses without investing significantly more time. In other words TDL enables one to teach testing and TDD for free.