An Effective Agile Teaching Environment for Java Programming Courses

This paper proposes an effective agile teaching environment with a new educational testing framework for especially Java programming courses. The testing framework is developed on top of JUnit that runs on the Eclipse platform. The deployed testing programs detect errors in the student´s code, and then report points lost due to mistakes, and give suitable pieces of advice to correct or improve the code immediately. With automated testing the students can check the validity of their code by themselves. This means that the instructor can concentrate on mentoring the students who are most in need of support and advice. Our proposed method also ensures the evaluation of assignments to be fair and strict by applying various well-behaved input patterns based on standard software testing techniques while saving time. With our testing framework, students are continuously aware of their progress under a game-like environment, and thereby they keep concentrating on their given tasks