Rohaida Romli

Current Practices of Programming Assessment at Higher Learning Institutions

Assessing students’ programming exercises has become a difficult activity that most educators encounter nowadays. The activity basically includes the tasks to construct questions and solution models in programming exercises as well as the method to evaluate students’ solutions. Existing studies particularly in the area of programming assessment still have limited discussions on current practices in conducting the activity. This paper reports the preliminary study conducted among educators who have been teaching programming courses at higher learning institutions within the northern region in Malaysia. The study aims to gauge the current practices in the construction and evaluation of programming exercises item among educators at the associated institutions. The study used a questionnaire to gather the relevant data from the selected subjects. The results reveal that both the negative and positive testing criteria are essential in constructing and evaluating programming exercises. The findings of this study will be the input to identify the adequate criteria that should be included in developing a schema of test set for automatic programming assessment.

Identification of criteria affecting software project monitoring task of Agile Kanban method

Currently, software development organizations (SDOs) attempt to deliver their software products quickly, within the prescribed period, and with the highest quality and lowest cost, yet this is proven a big challenge for them. Agile Kanban method recently is gaining increasing attention and popularity, due to its numerous advantages that make it performs better than other methods in terms of managing software projects. Beside of that, it has a board that used to visualize the workflow and monitor the project progress. However, various studies have shown that this method has significant challenges that negatively impact the scheduling of the development process. Consequently, late delivery of software projects may occur, thus the rate of projects’ failures will be increased. This paper aims to identify the challenges and criteria that affect the progress monitoring task of Agile Kanban method using a narrative review method, whereby this review method is adopted to identify and summarize what has been previously published, avoid duplications, and seek new study areas which are not yet addressed. Finally, the findings of this study would be used to develop an improved software project monitoring task model of Agile Kanban method. That model would be capable to keep projects progress as it is planned, and thus leading to successful delivering for software projects according to its specifications, time, and budget.

A Theoretical Framework for Improving Software Project Monitoring Task of Agile Kanban Method

Progress monitoring task is one of the critical steps in the software project management (SPM). Consequently, successful realization of software projects is strongly associated with used method in implementing and monitoring those projects. Over the recent years, the adoption of Agile Kanban method is being increased, however, this method still having significant challenges in progress monitoring task during the process of software development. Therefore, this paper aims to draw upon relevant theories and conducts in-depth a review in order to establish a theoretical framework to improve the progress monitoring task of Agile Kanban method. Our findings revealed that three elements need improvements, which are progress tracking (PT), limiting work-in-progress WIP (LWIP), and progress visualization (PV). In addition, the three elements are aligned with theories, which are the explicit theory of project management (TETPM), progress monitoring theory (PMT), and the program theory (TPT). These findings extend the current literature on Agile software development by providing a holistic view on how progress monitoring task should be improved.

Coverage criteria for test case generation using UML state chart diagram

To improve the effectiveness of test data generation during the software test, many studies have focused on the automation of test data generation from UML diagrams. One of these diagrams is the UML state chart diagram. Test cases are generally evaluated according to coverage criteria. However, combinations of multiple criteria are required to achieve better coverage. Different studies used various number and types of coverage criteria in their methods and approaches. The objective of this paper to propose suitable coverage criteria for test case generation using UML state chart diagram especially in handling loops. In order to achieve this objective, this work reviewed previous studies to present the most practical coverage criteria combinations, including all-states, all-transitions, all-transition-pairs, and all-loop-free-paths coverage. Calculation to determine the coverage percentage of the proposed coverage criteria were presented together with an example has they are applied on a UML state chart di...

A Review on Meta-Heuristic Search Techniques for Automated Test Data Generation: Applicability Towards Improving Automatic Programming Assessment

Meta-Heuristic Search Techniques (MHST) recently have become among of the popular techniques applied in software testing research particularly in supporting Automated Test Data Generation (ATDG). MHST are generally defined as high-level frameworks to carry out the most optimal test data searching for efficient software testing so as to achieving effective cost reduction. ATDG is commonly known as a method used in software testing to automatically furnish a set of inputs or test data that do satisfy certain selected criteria. Having to integrate ATDG as part of testing in the area of computer science education, hence there should be a promising potential by embracing MHST with the current practice of Automatic Programming Assessment (APA). APA is identified as a technique applied in computer science education to execute automated marking and grading on students’ programming exercises. Thus, it motivates us to study on the gaps occurred between software testing and computer science education research areas in term of the significance of adapting MHST in deriving the desired test data to perform a dynamic testing in APA. In this paper, we provide an analysis of a review on the related topic of interest as part of the conducted Systematic Literature Review (SLR). This SLR is expected to highlight the current state and significance of MHST implementation in supporting ATDG to cover both of the dynamic functional and structural testing as well as to provide insight on MHST applicability towards improving the test data generation process in APA. As the result of this study, it depicts that MHST have been burgeoning most of the interest by researchers in ATDG and yet have been successfully carried out in achieving test data adequacy for efficient testing. With this current state, it positively offers a promising insight towards improving the state of the art of APA.

The Impact of Knowledge Management in Pair Programming on Program Quality

This paper reports on an initiative that determines the most appropriate technique for supporting students’ programming ability. The proposed technique combines pair programming (PP) and SECI process that is a knowledge management (KM) model. Combining PP and SECI resulted in the formation of four approaches, which are named as NSNR, NSYR, YSNR, and YSYR. In those four approaches, the subjects who are students of IT-related programs in a higher learning institution complete a set of programming questions. The approaches were then compared based on the subjects’ scores in their program codes. Descriptive statistics was used to analyze the gathered data. Generally, the results show that switching the roles (driver and navigator) in PP enhances good quality of coding. Through this study, an initial formation of the KM model and programming technique is contributed in enhancing program quality. Further, future work to be considered can be a rigorous theoretical formation for constructing other important determinants to enhance program quality because the findings of this research are minimal to SECI model and pair programming technique only.