Unci

Abstract

This paper describes Unci, a unit-testing language with a clean and minimal interface suitable for introducing beginning programming students to the ideas of unit testing and test-driven development. We detail why CppUnit, a common C++-based unit-testing framework, is not well-suited for beginners, and present Unci and explain how it addresses the weaknesses of CppUnit. Finally, we present a comparison of CS2 student performance in the two systems, showing that moving from CppUnit to Unci resulted in an approximate doubling in the proportion of students able to write an effective test suite for a lab assignment.