Carl Erickson

Object-oriented integration testing

IntegKItCO~ 0 bject-oriented software development raises important testing issues. Many of these stem from attempts to directly apply theoretical constructs and techniques of traditional software develop ment and testing to object-oriented software. We examine this traditional heritage here, with special emphasis on assumptions and practices that need to be modified or replaced. We identify five levels of object-oriented testing; four of these map nicely into the commonly accepted unit, integration, and system levels of traditional software testing. (Placement of the remaining level is primarily a management consideration .) We also identify two new testing constructs and a directed graph notation that helps formalize object-oriented integration testing. These are illustrated with an object-oriented formulation of an automated teller machine (ATM) system. The source code (ObjectiveC) for this system is available from the authors. We begin with an important distinction: structure vs. behavior. Most of the popular notations used in software development (E/R models, data flow diagrams, structure charts, PDLs, and so on) portray software structure: the components, relationships among these, the interfaces,

RUNESTONE, an international student collaboration project

Students will eventually work in a global market; what better preparation can be provided for international collaboration than...international collaboration? The RUNESTONE project is developing and evaluating the notion of incorporating international group projects into the undergraduate computer science curriculum. RUNESTONE adds new dimensions to student teamwork, requiring students to handle collaboration that is remote, cross-cultural and linguistically challenging. RUNESTONE is a three year project, with the prototype version running in Winter 1998 with students at Uppsala University, Sweden, and Grand Valley State University, Michigan, USA. The 1998 pilot study will be followed by a full-scale implementation in 1999 and another in 2000.

An international student/faculty collaboration: the Runestone project

Students of today need to be prepared to work in globally distributed organizations. Part of that preparation involves teaching students to work effectively in teams to solve problems. Students also must be able to work with individuals located at distant sites where there is no or very little face-to-face interaction. The Runestone project, an international collaboration between two universities, adds new dimensions to student teamwork, requiring students to handle collaboration that is remote, cross-cultural, and technically challenging. Runestone is a three-year project funded by the Swedish Council for the Renewal of Undergraduate Education. A pilot study in 1998 was followed by a full-scale implementation in 1999 with another implementation ongoing in 2000.Each time this global cooperation project is run, both students and faculty learn important lessons in how to work with each other in a virtual environment. This paper discusses both student and faculty learning outcomes for Runestone 1999.

USENET as a teaching tool

USENET is a distributed bulletin board with approximately 2.7 million users. Some schools, particularly those without Intemet access, do not have USENET available locally. Many schools already have local USENET sites, but do not take advantage of this resource in a formal way. In the first case this paper should serve as a point of departure to becoming a USENET site. In both cases I hope to inspire faculty to consider how USENET can contribute to their students’ learning experience. This paper explains what USENET is, what resources are required to be a USENET site, and how USENET has been used in upper-level computer science courses.

A pedagogical pattern for bringing service into the curriculum via the web

The Web reduces the economic hurdles of publishing a message to a large audience. This paper documents a pedagogical pattern to integrate community service with the curriculum. Students in two different computer science courses teamed up to create websites for local non profit organizations (NPOs). The projects provided CS majors with real customers, the challenge of working on an interdisciplinary team, an opportunity for community service, and an opportunity to learn very new technologies. For their part the NPOs gained a new means of communicating their missions to the world. We believe the potential for reuse of this pattern is high and could benefit other schools and communities.

The EOS laboratory environment for a course in operating systems

This paper describes a laboratory environment for teaching operating systems. The EOS (Exploratory Operating Systems) lab was developed with a National Science Foundation ILI grant to be used in conjunction with a traditional operating systems (OS) course. The main goal of the EOS project was to improve the teaching of operating system principles without the necessity of a special purpose laboratory and the addition to the curriculum of a second course in OS. The EOS labs are summarized and a CPU scheduling lab is described in some detail. A standardized testing instrument was used to compare class performance before and after adding the lab to the OS course. Preliminary results show an improvement attributable to the EOS laboratory. The authors experience in building a workstation laboratory from an externally funded grant is described.

Teaching networking and operating systems to information systems majors

Teaching networking and operating systems to information systems majors presents many challenges. Operating systems and networking tend to be taught in one of two ways. Either the material is non-technical, directed more toward the business information systems major, or the material is overly technical, equivalent of teaching a traditional computer science course. We have developed a model for teaching networking and operating systems to information systems majors that bridges that gap. The material is taught in the context of network administration, a topic well-suited to information systems majors. This paper describes our model, the curriculum we use, and the experience of students and faculty.