Design and Implementation of A Tool to Integrate Automated Test Data Generation and Automatic Programming Assessment

Nowadays, manually assessing students’ programming exercises has been identified as among of the toughest tasks to lecturers of programming courses on top of their high routine workloads.Thus, Automatic Programming Assessment (or APA) has turn out to be an alternative method to automatically assess these students’ programming exercises effectively.In APA, test data generation process has mainly being a part of performing dynamic testing on students’ programming solutions. Diverse of automated test data generation (or ATDG) methods have been researched in past few years.However, these methods have not been sufficiently and systematically adapted by researches in APA. Nonetheless, it appears very limited studies have put in some efforts to realize an integration of APA and ATDG as a complete APA system (or APAS) so as to provide a better quality and precise program testing on students’ programs.So as to realize this limitation, this paper presents the design and implementation of an APAS named Automated Java Programming Assessment Tool or Auto-JPAT that integrates a recent proposed ATDG method named DyStruc-TDG (which covers a dynamic structural testing).As a whole, Auto-JPAT contributes as a means to educators of programming courses to assess students’ programming solutions via a dynamic-structural testing regardless of having any sufficient knowledge on design of test cases