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Paper (refereed) IT Education: Best Practices

Recommended Citation: Finkbine, R B and N Kraft. Introducing the Test Harness: Automating the Test Suite. In The Proceedings of the Information Systems Education Conference 2002, v 19 (San Antonio): §222d. ISSN: 1542-7382.

Introducing the Test Harness: Automating the Test Suite

Refereed

Ronald B. Finkbine    [a1] [a2]
Computer Science
Indiana University Southeast    [u1] [u2]
New Albany, Indiana, USA    [c1] [c2]

Nicholas Kraft [a1] [a2]
Clemson University [u1] [u2]

Software testing is an essential component in the development of quality software. It is important for students to have a solid introduction to this in their academic career. Since students are not often excited to write code, they certainly will not be interested in testing their code. Students will often only submit test executions for a small handful of test cases and rarely will they regression test the entire test suite. The repetition necessary for proper testing is an obvious contributing factor to this problem. Enter the test harness. Automation of a test suite is an effective way to allow for quick and repeatable testing of a program. Though, it requires effort to build the test harness, it can be used to test the program throughout the development and maintenance process. Allowance for quick regression testing in every test harness execution is an added bonus.

Keywords: software testing, quality software, test harness, regression testing

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