Easy Test !

Declaration All sentences or passages quoted in this dissertation from other people's work have been specifically acknowledged by clear cross-referencing to author, work and page(s). I understand that failure to do these amounts to plagiarism and will be considered grounds for failure in this dissertation and the degree examination as a whole. Abstract Norman Fenton states in his book Software Metric (1997 edition) that Test first strategy is 50% more productive based on LOC measurements. Renowned author Nell Dale remarks, " Testing must begin in CS1 (equivalent to first year) courses and reinforced in each succeeding year " in view of rampant non-conformance to the ACM/IEEE Computing Curriculum 2001. Another renowned author Michael Goldwasser observed at SIGCSE 2002, " Testing as a unit is given very little coverage in introductory courses, often with only an expectation of ad-hoc debugging of one's own implementation ". In 2002 Goldwasser further states that XP has the largest market share among all agile methodologies. Glenford Myers states in his book the Art of Software Testing (2004 edition) the rule of the thumb is that most projects expend 50 percent of development time and about the same proportion of cost on testing. The above paragraph may seem to be a haphazard sequence of incidents. However, astute readers would be able to infer the stark contradiction portrayed between what happens in academia and the trends in software industry. Software testing has received as less importance in the curriculum as much as its importance has scaled the heights in the software industry. 'Test First' is the buzzword of the industry while at the teaching level it is not even methodically treated as an important part of the course at the beginner's level of the undergraduate course. The main aim of this project is to inculcate the notion of testing among students of the first Java course of the department of Computer Science at the University of Sheffield. It seeks to develop and awareness about the importance and benefits of testing among beginners so that they can think more logically of the possible faults their elementary programs may contain. It attempts to convert testing from an art to a craft right at the inception of programming fundamentals. The produced system demonstrates the process of writing elementary tests for simple programs from their specifications. It also generates sample test data for the students to observe the utility and purpose …