Experiences Using Automated 4ests and 4est Driven Development in Computer 9cience I

We are interested in how to expose our students to test driven development (TDD) and have experimented with a variety of ways of leveraging testing technology to help our students learn to program in our first programming course. Initially, we developed a framework that allows the students to run tests that are developed by the faculty member. That experience led us to developing a JUnit plug-in that allowed the students to specify the tests without having to write the test code. As a result of these experiences, we have re-structured this class into these roughly sequential phases: learning to read code, learning to write code, and learning to program. Throughout this course, the students are using TDD, writing their own JUnit tests, and refactoring as they develop their code iteratively. This change has been made without dropping any of the required course content.