Test My Code: An Automatic Assessment Service for the Extreme Apprenticeship Method - 2nd International Workshop on Evidence-Based Technology Enhanced Learning - page 110

Fig. 2 New menu option and buttons are installed by the TMC-plugin. The smiley-window
is an indicator that previously submitted exercises passed the tests.
Student's perspective
From the students' perspective, working starts with registering to a course using the
web interface. Once the registration is done, basic development tools, e.g. NetBeans,
are installed, after which the TMC-plugin is added to the IDE. This is usually the
very first exercise for a course that utilizes TMC.
After the TMC plugin has been added to NetBeans, a new menu option entitled
TMC and three new toolbar buttons are visible in the IDE (see areas pointed out
with arrows in Figure 2). The menu option gives possibilities for changing settings
(e.g. username, course, directory for downloading exercises), checking for new exer-
cises, and submitting answers. The leftmost toolbar button is for running the current
application (independently of any accidentally selected main project). The middle
button is for testing the application locally, and the third button is for sending the
solution to the assessment server. If the student presses the run tests locally-button,
local tests for the exercise are run and possible scaffolding messages are shown.
Since one of the goals in our CS1 is to introduce students to the concept of unit
testing, the scaffolding messages follow the classic TDD style [11], where the stu-
dent sees a green/red bar and an informative error message. TMC supports both
local and server-side tests, which means that the test code can be hidden from the
student. Once an exercise has been submitted, the student will see feedback from
the assessment server after related tests have been executed, for example the “All
tests passed”-notifier, which is visible in the Figure 2. One can configure feedback
questions to the notifier, which allows easy feedback gathering.
Instructor's perspective
From the instructors' perspective creating a new course starts with initiating a Git
version control system repository that is used to store the exercises. Once a reposi-
tory has been created, a new course instance is created using the TMC web-interface,
that provides options for e.g. configuring feedback questions shown to students as
they submit exercises, inspecting students' code and viewing score and submission
statistics.
Each instructor wishing to contribute to the exercises clones the git repository to
a local machine. Once modifications are made or new exercises have been crafted,
changes are pushed to the central repository. An administrator then asks TMC to
load the changes from the central repository and makes them visible to the students.