Automated Feedback for Quality Assurance in Software Engineering Education

Author

Cardell-Oliver, Rachel ; Zhang, Lu ; Barady, Rieky ; Lim, You Hai ; Naveed, Asad ; Woodings, Terry

Author_Institution

Sch. of Comput. Sci. & Software Eng., Univ. of Western Australia, Crawley, WA, Australia

fYear

2010

fDate

6-9 April 2010

Firstpage

157

Lastpage

164

Abstract

This paper investigates the use of automated testing tools for improving the quality of programs produced by software engineering students. Our approach to software quality assurance utilizes open source, professional software engineering tools to measure a number of quality attributes. Programming assignments are designed and the tools configured to provide timely, formative feedback to students. Evaluation of over 450 student assignments developed both with and without tool support demonstrates that the feedback both enables and motivates students to improve significantly the quality of their submitted programming assignments.

Keywords

engineering education; program testing; software quality; automated feedback; automated testing tools; software engineering education; software quality assurance; Australia; Computer science; Computer science education; Educational programs; Feedback; Programming profession; Quality assurance; Software engineering; Software quality; Software testing; automatic assessment; software engineering education; software quality; software testing;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Software Engineering Conference (ASWEC), 2010 21st Australian

Conference_Location

Auckland

ISSN

1530-0803

Print_ISBN

978-0-7695-4006-1

Electronic_ISBN

1530-0803

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ASWEC.2010.24

Filename

5475060