Automated testing of case studies in programming courses

The majority of Learning management systems (LMS) provide the functionality only for evaluation of built-in tests activities without any support for evaluation of case studies, which are frequently used in programming courses. These have to be checked manually by an instructor, what is time consuming especially in case if courses are attended with a high number of students. In this paper we propose an automated submission process decomposed in several phases. We provide a detailed description of particular phases with selected tools as jPlag and PMD. The aim of our work is to combine existing tools into one coherent system connected with LMS (Moodle) and IDEs and not to go a way of implementing a new standalone validation and assignment system. We present also some partial results and experiences using jPlag and PMD tools on our courses - Programming, Object oriented programming and Technologies Java.