Automated Error-Prevention and Error-Detection Tools for Assembly Language in the Educational Environment

Automated tools for error prevention and error detection exist for many high-level languages, but have been nonexistent for assembly-language programs, embedded programs in particular. We present new tools that improve the quality and reliability of assembly-language programs by helping the educator automate the arduous tasks of exposing and correcting common errors and oversights. These tools give the educator a user-friendly, but powerful means of completely testing student programs. The new tools that we have developed are the result of years of research and experience by the authors in testing and debugging students´ programming assignments. During this time, we created a few preliminary versions of these automated tools, allowing us to test our students´ projects in one fell swoop. These tools gave us the ability to catch stack errors and memory-access errors that we would not have been able to detect with normal testing. These tools considerably shortened the amount of testing time and allowed us to detect a larger group of errors