Applying Test-driven Development to Evaluating Student Projects

Grading software projects submitted by students can become a heavy and time-consuming task, which for many students, can result in delayed feedback provided to them. Additionally, one would like to allow students to evaluate themselves early their projects before submitting the final version for grading. This paper presents a solution that improves the grading process of student projects not only for lecturers, but also for students. In our approach, we adopt a test-driven development methodology to provide a clear benchmark of the course project implementation. Our approach allows students to self-evaluate their progress at any moment, while lecturers can use it to automate the grading process. GitHub Classroom is used as a supporting tool to allow students to retrieve and implement their projects from the same initial skeleton project including the tests, and lecturers to retrieve the student projects and evaluate them automatically. The results show that test-driven development is a viable solution to be applied in an academic environment to improve the grading process. This study also shows that courses in Information Technology area could use our approach to increase learning and teaching efficiency.