Download Tool Support for Introductory Software Engineering Education

than. The comparison policy can be specified programmatically allowing the
implementation of custom validation steps; and
•
an aggregate state “step” that extracts the property values from an object and
collates them into a list of values. This aggregate state list can then be
compared to the expected list of values of a known reference object. These
known reference objects are referred to as gold standard objects.
4.4.3.4
Summary
Test Mentor is an example of the tools that are available for professional testing
activity. There are many other similar tools with different languages as the focus and
with slightly differing functionality. What they have in common is a user interface
for the construction of test cases and for the automatic execution of these test cases
and the collection of the results. The target for some of these environments is the
non-programming tester – someone who works in the quality assurance department
of a company but who does not need to have particular experience with the
language that a project has been developed in. For such people, a user interface for
the generation of assets and tests that hides the underlying language details can be
invaluable.
However, while it can be used by a non-programmer, the functionality it provides is
still quite advanced. That is, whilst the non-programmer may not be familiar with
the programming language being used, they are still professional testers and hence
are familiar with more concepts and practices from the testing field. Furthermore,
they also have the time to invest to become familiar with a complex tool such as
Test Mentor.
The ability to generate test stubs quickly using reflection and call monitoring can be
very useful for large legacy applications, but this is not an activity that introductory
students are likely to be performing.
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