Black-box Testing in the Introductory Programming Class
Tamara Babaian and Wendy Lucas
Introductory programming courses are often a challenge to both the students taking them and the instructors teaching them. The scope and complexity of topics required for learning how to program can distract from the importance of learning how to test. Even the textbooks on introductory programming rarely address the topic of testing. Yet, anyone who will be involved in the system development process should understand the critical need for testing and know how to design test cases that identify bugs and verify the correct functionality of applications. This paper describes a testing exercise that has been integrated into an introductory programming course as part of an overall effort to focus attention on effective software testing techniques.1 A comparison of the performance on a common programming assignment of students who had participated in the testing exercise to that of students who had not demonstrates the value of following such an approach.
Keywords: testing, debugging, black-box method, introductory programming
Tamara Babaian is an Assistant Professor of Computer Information Systems at Bentley College. She received her Ph.D. in Computer Science from Tufts University. Her research interests include both theoretical and practical aspects of artificial intelligence, collaborative interfaces, and system usability. Her work has been published in the Proceedings of the International Conference on Artificial Intelligence Planning Systems, and the International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces. Her teaching interests are object-oriented programming, database systems and algorithms.
Wendy Lucas is an Associate Professor of Computer Information Systems at Bentley College in Waltham, MA. She received her M.S. from the MIT Sloan School of Management and her Ph.D. from the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science Department at Tufts University. Her research interests include Web search, information retrieval and presentation, interface usability, and data visualization. She has published in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Information Processing & Management, and Theory and Practice of Object Systems. Her primary teaching interests are programming languages, algorithms, object-oriented technologies, and business-related IT applications.
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