Unit Testing in Data Structures Graphical Learning Environment

Almost each software product contains bugs. If a critical bug is discovered after deployment of the product, then its fix can be very expensive, especially in case of embedded systems that cannot be updated online. Because of that, testing before deployment belongs to the most important phases in development of almost any software product. It plays a key role in various software development methodologies, and the main idea behind it is to find as many bugs as possible to improve robustness of a software under development and to minimize the likelihood that a critical bug will be found after its deployment. This indicates that the ability to find bugs and fix them should belong to the basic skills of any programmer. If a programmer has very good abilities in this field, then he or she can become test designer or architect, i.e., a person responsible for identification of main goals of testing, key test scenarios, and design of tests themselves. One of the basic skills of each programmer, software engineer or test designer is creation of simple automated tests responsible for testing a module (unit) of a software. This kind of testing is known as unit testing, and its main purpose is to verify that each element (usually function or procedure) of a module gives correct outputs for specific inputs. Many environments for software development come with special tools designed for this task. There also exist a lot of third party libraries that simplify process of development of unit tests. However, graduates of study programs related to informatics should not know only how to work with such tools, but they should also understand how these tools work and how they can create such a tool. For this purpose, we created a special module, which is a part of more complex environment intended for enhancement learning data structures. The whole environment allows students not only to understand principles of various data structures but also to grasp knowledge how unit testing works. Wis more, thanks to the testing module, the students can create various automated tests, which allow them to understand principles of data structures in more detail.