Test-driven design for introductory OO programming

Abstract

Test-Driven Design (TDD) has been shown to increase the productivity of programming teams and improve the quality of the code they produce. However, most of the introductory curricula provide no introduction to test design, no support for defining the tests, and do not insist on a comprehensive test coverage that is the driving force of the TDD.This paper presents a curriculum, pedagogy, and the software support for introductory object-oriented program design that uses the TDD consistently from the very beginning. The testing software does not increase the program complexity and is designed to work with the simplest programs. It has been used by hundreds of students at several colleges and is freely available on the web.Our experiences show that besides improving the quality of code students produce, TDD combined with the novice-appropriate test libraries reinforces students' understanding of the object oriented program design.