The Capabilities of Automated Functional Testing of Programming Assignments

In the emerging world of information technologies, a growing number of students is choosing this specialization for their education. Therefore, the number of homework and laboratory research assignments that should be tested is also growing. The majority of these tasks is based on the necessity to implement some algorithm as a small program. This article discusses the possible solutions to the problem of automated testing of programming laboratory research assignments. The course “Algorithmization and Programming of Solutions” is offered to all the first-year students of The Faculty of Computer Science and Information Technology (∼500 students) in Riga Technical University and it provides the students the basics of the algorithmization of computing processes and the technology of program design using Java programming language (the given course and the University will be considered as an example of the implementation of the automated testing). During the course eight laboratory research assignments are planned, where the student has to develop an algorithm, create a program and submit it to the education portal of the University. The VBA test program was designed as one of the solutions, the requirements for each laboratory assignment were determined and the special tests have been created. At some point, however, the VBA offered options were no longer able to meet the requirements, therefore the activities on identifying the requirements for the automation of the whole cycle of programming work reception, testing and evaluation have begun.