Week 12: Debugging and Unit Testing

• Teach effective ways to find bugs in programs.
• Motivate students to adequately test their programs.

• Christensen (2008). Experiences with a Focus on Testing in Teaching. BCK.
• McCauley (2008). Debugging: A Review of the Literature from an Educational Perspective.

Optional:

• Ahmadzadeh (2005). An Analysis of Patterns of Debugging Among Computer Science Students.
• Murphy (2010). Pair Debugging: A Transactive Discourse Analysis.

• Programming by testing first
• Using a debugger (Java vs. C/C++)
• Keys to debugging (from Horstmann, Chapter 6):
  • breakpoints
  • single-stepping
  • inspecting variables
• Assertions and invariants
• Unit testing
• Code coverage and creating test cases

• AP CS: Locate sections in Horstmann related to debugging and testing
• JUnit testing in Eclipse (http://www.eclipse.org)
• JSwat (http://www.bluemarsh.com/java/jswat)