Evaluating test suite effectiveness and assessing student code via constraint logic programming

Abstract

A good suite of test inputs is an indispensable tool both for manual and automated assessment of student submissions to programming assignments. Yet, without a way to evaluate our test suites, it is difficult to know how well we are doing, much less improve our practice. We present a technique for evaluating a hand-generated test suite by comparing its ability to find defects against that of a test suite generated automatically using Constraint Logic Programming (CLP). We describe our technique and present a case study using student submissions for an assignment from a second-year programming course. Our results show that a CLP-generated test suite was able to identify significant defects that the instructor-generated suite missed, despite having similar code coverage.