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.).
Assertions and Unit TestingPython ExamplesJava ExamplesRuby ExamplesWebinar
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)
}
Created and curated by Joe Mazzone
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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