Current Practices of Dynamic-Structural Testing in Programming Assessments

Automatic Programming Assessment (or APA) has been known as an important method to automatically mark and grade students’ programming exercises. It has been gaining a lot of attention from many researchers either to emphasize on the aspect of static analysis or dynamic testing (functional and structural testing). To date, not many recent studies attempted to focus on the context of structural testing even though, it is key in the software testing industry. Hence it becomes one of the most critical aspects of testing to be considered. Besides that, current literatures also lack information on APA’s detailed practices. Thus, we conducted a preliminary study to investigate the test adequacy criteria that have been commonly employed in the current practices of programming assessments which are applicable only to dynamic-structural testing. Specifically, this refers to testing that needs a program execution and focuses on the logic coverage of the tested program. In this paper, we reveal the means of conducting the preliminary study and its analysis and findings. From the findings, it has been discovered that most educators are commonly adopting the identified structural code coverage in programming assessments and even have a great leaning towards allowing those criteria to be considered in implementing APA