Third Digital Education Reading Group Meeting

[Hamouda, Sally]

We invite you to join us for our third Digital Education Reading Group Meeting for Spring 2024. This will be Friday, April 5^th  at 11:00AM, by Zoom at https://virginiatech.zoom.us/my/shaffer.

 

Our paper is: Evaluating the Quality of Student-Written Software Tests with Curated Mutation Analysis. The paper will be presented by Rifat.

Abstract: 

An important learning outcome in software engineering education is the ability to write an effective test suite that rigorously tests a target application. The standard approach for assessing test suites is to check coverage which can be problematic because coverage rewards code invocation, without checking test assertion correctness.

Mutation Analysis (injecting a small fault into a clone of a codebase) has been used in both industry and academia to check test suite quality. A mutant is killed if any tests in the test suite fail on the clone. More mutants killed indicates a stronger suite, as it is more sensitive to defects. Mutation Analysis has been limited in an educational setting because of the prohibitive cost in both time and compute power to run the students’ suites over all generated clones.

We employed Mutation Analysis to assess test suite quality in our upper-year Software Engineering course at a large research intensive university. This paper makes two contributions: (1) We show that it is feasible and effective to use a small sample of hand-written mutants for grading, and (2) We assess effectiveness for promoting student learning by comparing students graded with coverage to those graded with Mutation Analysis.

We found that mutation graded students write more correct tests, check more of the behaviour of invoked code, and more actively seek to understand the project specification.

Paper Link: https://dl-acm-org.ezproxy.lib.vt.edu/doi/pdf/10.1145/3563767.3568132

Looking forward to seeing you all.

Thanks!

Dr. Sally Hamouda

Collegiate Associate Professor Department of Computer Science

Torgersen 1220C  

Virginia Tech, Blacksburg, VA, 24061

[Hamouda, Sally]

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[Hamouda, Sally]

[Hamouda, Sally]

A reminder that we are meeting this Friday 4/5 at 11:00 am for our third digital education reading group.

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From: Hamouda, Sally <sall...@vt.edu>
Sent: Friday, March 15, 2024 10:16 AM
To: digital-educatio...@googlegroups.com <digital-educatio...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Third Digital Education Reading Group Meeting