Oto is a customizable and extensible marking tool which aims at providing timely feedback to students. Based on simple test cases description formats, Oto also includes operations that help students easily test-even "mark"-their own programs.
It is widely accepted that there is more to software construction than basic programming skills. Professional software construction involves not only understanding some theoretical concepts, but also mastering appropriate tools and practices. In this paper, we present an undergraduate course in
Software Construction and Maintenance
, developed with the goal of introducing students to those key concepts, tools and practices.
We first outline the content of that course, explaining how it fits within our undergraduate program. We then present a key element of that course-namely, its
maintenance corpus
along with its testing frameworks-used to concretely
introduce
students to various tools and practices, e.g., automatic test execution, build and configuration management, source code documentation, use of assertions, etc.
In a first course in formal methods for software engineers, the emphasis on the topic of logic should be on using (first-order predicate) logic to specify and formally describe properties. In this paper, we suggest using ERDs (Entity-Relationship Diagrams) as support for formalization exercises. Starting from graphical descriptions (ERDs) and textual informal specification of various constraints, students have to produce an equivalent textual and formal specification. We present the notation we use in our course (Spec), some heuristics to obtain the formal concepts from ERDs and a small example.
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