Stephen Edwards

I am an associate professor in the Department of Computer Science here at Virginia Tech. My research interests are in software engineering, the use of formal methods in programming languages, automated testing, component-based approaches, and computer science education. I am particularly interested in software reuse and component-based software engineering.

I am a member of the Reusable Software Research Group (RSRG), which has headquarters at both The Ohio State University and Clemson University. RSRG research addresses a broad spectrum of research, instructional, and technology transfer aspects of component-based software.

I also work with the Plug-and-Play Power Electronics Building Blocks Control Group here at Virginia Tech. This group works on modularizing and standardizing the control processing elements (both hardware and software) used in embedded control of power electronics systems.

Web-CAT is a plug-in-based web application that supports electronic submission and automated grading of programming assignments. It supports fully customizable, scriptable grading actions and feedback generation for any assignment.

Web-CAT supports traditional models of automated program grading, but also supports grading of assignments where students do their own testing. It helps encourage test-driven development (also called test-first coding), where students write small unit tests for each piece of code they add. Web-CAT allows a student to submit his or her test cases along with the solution, and grades on test validity and test completeness as well as code correctness.

Visit http://web-cat.org, our community-driven web site, to learn more about Web-CAT and some of our other educational projects. It provides our discussion forums, wiki-based documentation, screen capture movies of Web-CAT in action, downloads, and access to our bug tracker and feature request tracker..