Testing Across the Curriculum (Abstract Only)

Abstract

Many students find testing software as difficult and frustrating as they find writing prose. As with writing, no pedagogy will magically replace the need for plenty of practice. Therefore, we believe students should be required to write tests in as many courses as practical. This workshop will present a survey of tools that instructors can use to incorporate testing into many different courses throughout the curriculum. We will begin with a quick review of JUnit, then present tools such as (1) RSpec (Ruby's unit testing framework, on which many other testing frameworks are based), (2) MIPSUnit (MIPS assembly) (3) DLUnit (digital logic and simulated CPUs), (4) CUnit (Operating Systems and Networking), (5) Jasmine (JavaScript), (6) and Cucumber (which has many uses, including system tests on web applications). See http://www.cis.gvsu.edu/~kurmasz/TestingWorkshop for more details. (Note: This workshop is not designed to teach high-level testing principles such as "what tests do I need?", or "how do I know when I've written enough tests?" Similarly, this workshop will not cover TDD or BDD.)