POPT: uma abordagem de ensino de programação orientada a problema e testes

摘要

There is a growing interest of the Computer Science education community forincluding testing concepts on introductory programming courses. Aiming atcontributing to this issue, we introduce POPT, a Problem-Oriented Programming andTesting approach for Introductory Programming Courses. POPT main goal is toimprove the traditional method of teaching introductory programming thatconcentrates mainly on implementation and neglects testing. POPT extends POP(Problem Oriented Programing) methodology proposed on the PhD Thesis of AndreaMendonça (UFCG). In both methodologies POPT and POP, students skills in dealingwith ill-defined problems must be developed since the first programming courses. InPOPT however, students are stimulated to clarify ill-defined problem specifications,guided by de definition of test cases (in a table-like manner). This paper presentsPOPT, and TestBoot a tool developed to support the methodology. In order toevaluate the approach a case study and a controlled experiment (which adopted theLatin Square design) were performed. In an Introductory Programming course ofComputer Science and Software Engineering Graduation Programs at the FederalUniversity of Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil. The study results have shown that, whencompared to a Blind Testing approach, POPT stimulates the implementation ofprograms of better external quality the first program version submitted by POPTstudents passed in twice the number of test cases (professor-defined ones) whencompared to non-POPT students. Moreover, POPT students submitted fewerprogram versions and spent more time to submit the first version to the automaticevaluation system, which lead us to think that POPT students are stimulated to thinkbetter about the solution they are implementing. The controlled experiment confirmedthe influence of the proposed methodology on the quality of the code developed byPOPT students