Most of the introductory texts that focus on Java do not discuss unit testing until students have been programming for a while. Often, testing is not taught at all. Part of the reason is that the test design requires that the programmer understands the subtleties of different levels of equality of objects and data values.

Our tester library has been designed to support test-first design in Java starting from the first simplest program, with no syntactic overhead. Furthermore, the requirement of understanding the method behavior prior to designing the method leads to an improved understanding of the programming language and the object-oriented design.

Our summer hands-on workshop will show you how you can practice test-first design from the beginning, and will follow up with a discussion of more advanced curriculum on software testing.

Prerequisites: Basic knowledge of Java; interest in learning about test-first design. Prior exposure to functional style of prgramming is strongly recommended.

Dates for Summer 2012: June 25 - 27 at Northeastern University, Boston, MA.

Workshop format: Three days from 9:00 - 5:00 with lectures and hands-on labs.

Cost: For college faculty, all reasonable travel expenses, room and board, as well as all workshop mateials are covered by our NSF grants.

High school teachers are welcome to attend, but need to cover their travel expenses. Low cost housing in student residences will be available. We will provide breakfast and lunch, and all workshop materials.

Registration: Send email to Viera K. Proulx with your name, address, affiliation, and a brief description of why you are interested in this workshop.

Workshop program: A preliminary outline of the workshop curriculum is available here.

Partial support for this project has been provided by the NSF grant Redesigning Introductory Computing: The Design Discipline (DUE-0618543) and by the NSF grant Integrating Test Design into Computing Curriculum from the Beginning (DUE-0920182)