Testing of open-source software developed in class

Abstract

Open-source software (OSS) has seen considerable growth in the software industry. Many companies have started using OSS for their mission-critical applications. The transparency of OSS technology and the easy availability of the source code makes it ideal for students to participate in OSS project development. Also working on OSS projects helps improve students’ software development skills [j]. Students often come up with brilliant ideas and develop wonderful software applications. These artifacts have the potential to become good OSS. We would like this work to benefit the OSS community. But these artifacts are developed over a short period of time, with limited resources and knowledge, and usually with minimal or no testing. Thus, the quality is not assured. We provide, as a solution, a generic process that students can use to improve the quality of the code that they write. The framework encourages students to write comprehensive test cases.