Anthony Allowatt and Stephen H. Edwards. IDE support for test-driven development and automated grading in both Java and C++. Poster presented at the eTX poster session of OOPSLA'05: the 20th Annual ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Object Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications, October 2005.

Students need to learn testing skills, and using test-driven development on assignments is one way to help students learn. JUnit support in Eclipse provides an integrated unit testing experience for Java users, and combined with our automated grading system called Web-CAT, we can assess the validity and completeness of their test cases. To ease the transition from Java programming to C++ programming, we have developed a plug-in to integrate CxxTest, a C++ unit testing framework, into Eclipse by using the C Development Tools (CDT) to write new incremental builders that detect test cases and generate an appropriate runner for them. A CxxTest view is also provided that duplicates the look and feel of the JUnit view as closely as is appropriate. Further, we have created a extensible plug-in that provides an interface that allows students to automatically submit their projects to an internet site for collection or to an automated grading system such as Web-CAT, whose results will be presented to the student directly in the Eclipse IDE.