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A Domain-Specific Language for Dynamic White-Box Evaluation of Java Assignments

Authors Afonso B. Caniço , André L. Santos

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ACM Subject Classification
  • Software and its engineering → Software testing and debugging
  • Software and its engineering → Domain specific languages
  • Social and professional topics → Student assessment
Keywords
  • White-box assessment
  • student assessment
  • programming education

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Abstract

Programming exercises involving algorithms typically involve time and spatial constraints. Automated assessments for such implementations are often carried out in a black-box manner or through static analysis of the code, without considering the internal execution properties, which could lead to falsely positive evaluations of students' solutions. We present Witter, a domain-specific language for defining white-box test cases for the Java language. We evaluated programming assignment submissions from a Data Structures and Algorithms course against Witter’s test cases to determine if our approach could offer additional insight regarding incomplete algorithmic behaviour requirements. We found that a significant amount of student solutions fail to meet the desired algorithmic behavior (approx. 21%), despite passing black-box tests. Hence, we conclude that white-box tests are useful to achieve a thorough automated evaluation of this kind of exercises.

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Afonso B. Caniço and André L. Santos. A Domain-Specific Language for Dynamic White-Box Evaluation of Java Assignments. In 5th International Computer Programming Education Conference (ICPEC 2024). Open Access Series in Informatics (OASIcs), Volume 122, pp. 2:1-2:13, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2024) https://doi.org/10.4230/OASIcs.ICPEC.2024.2

Author Details

Afonso B. Caniço
  • Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL), Portugal
André L. Santos
  • Instituto Universitário de Lisboa (ISCTE-IUL), ISTAR-IUL, Portugal

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