Continuous Integration Pipelines to Assess Programming Assignments : Test Like a Professional

Examiners of programming assignments in higher education and people in the software industry both need to test and review code. However, the assessing techniques used are often quite different. The IT industry often uses agile work methods like continuous integration and automated tests, while examiners either do manual assessments or rely on code grading tools. The students will most likely become developers and work using agile processes. Therefore, there are possible benefits of universities trying to imitate the work processes of the software industry. The purpose of this study was to develop a workflow for programming assignments inspired by continuous integration, Scrum, and GitLab flow. The workflow was developed based on the requirements of Linnaeus University and tested on one of their programming assignments. It showed that a simplified agile work process is suitable for programming assignments since the demonstration fulfilled all of the predefined requirements. However, examiners might miss some of the workflow’s benefits if the programming assignment can not be tested automatically since it will require more manual work while grading