Learn How to Auto-Grade

Auto-grading is a powerful tool that saves teachers time and provides students with feedback regarding the correctness of their solution before they submit it for a grade.

All of this auto-grading magic can be accomplished with unit testing -- test whether parts (units) of a students code work properly by asserting that they meet certain conditions (equal to a predetermined value, produce a result in a given range, etc.).

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Quick Start

New to Unit Testing? Let's do a brief review.

TODO

Python - unittest

The basic building blocks of unit testing are test cases — single scenarios that must be set up and checked for correctness.

The simplest TestCase subclass will simply implement a test method (i.e. a method whose name starts with test) in order to perform specific testing code:

def test_default_case(self):
    # Your test case logic here (replace the example assertion below)
    # You may also rename this to any function in the form of 'test_your_test_name(self):'
    self.assertTrue(True)

Note that in order to test something, we use one of the assert*() methods provided by the TestCase base class. If the test fails, an exception will be raised with an explanatory message, and unittest will identify the test case as a failure. Any other exceptions will be treated as errors.

Tests can be numerous, and their set-up can be repetitive. Luckily, we can factor out set-up code by implementing a method called setUp(), which the testing framework will automatically call for every single test we run:

def setUp(self):
    # Setup code here (if required, replace the 'pass')
    pass

Similarly, we can provide a tearDown() method that tidies up after the test method has been run:

def tearDown(self):
    # Teardown code here (if required, replace the 'pass')
    pass

If setUp() succeeded, tearDown() will be run whether the test method succeeded or not.

Java - JUnit

TODO

@Test
public void testDefaultCase() {
    // You may rename this method to better suit the purpose of your test case
    // Your test case logic here
}

@Before
public void setUp() {
    // Setup code here (if required)
}

@After
public void tearDown() {
    // Teardown code here (if required)
}

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Joe Mazzone, former Computer and Software Engineering instructor at William M. Davies, Jr. Career and Technical High School in Lincoln, Rhode Island.

Joe is now a Senior Product Manager/Product Development Lead at John Wiley & Sons, Inc., working on Coding Rooms and zyBooks.

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