Test-Driven Learning with WebIDE

计算机科学(31)测试驱动开发(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的单元测试。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。尽管业界接受了TDD，但学术界对TDD的熟悉和理解却进展缓慢。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材料以及基于测试驱动学习(TDL)方法的第一年编程课程的基于网络的集成开发环境(WebIDE)来简化和加快TDD在学术界的采用。TDL是一种教授计算机编程的方法，它涉及以测试优先的方式通过自动化测试通过示例引入和探索新概念。通过在学生熟悉且可立即访问的环境(Web)中提供基于TDD的超简单使用界面的实验材料，消除了令人沮丧的障碍，使学生能够早期取得成功，专注于核心编程概念，并掌握初始语言语法。这些实验可以在学生学习传统CS1实施技能的同时提高他们的设计和测试技能。十多项实证研究已经评估了在课堂上使用TDD的效果。虽然结果并不是决定性的，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，更少的缺陷，以及编写明显不那么复杂的程序。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纳入TDL，学生可以在第一年的编程课程中学习应用TDD，而不需要投入大量的时间。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.