Introducing Unit Testing With BlueJ

The teaching of testing has never been easy. The introduction

of object orientation into first year courses has made it even

more difficult, since more and smaller units need to be tested

more often. In professional contexts this is addressed by the

use of testing support software. Unfortunately, no adequate

software to support testing for introductory students is widely

available, leaving teachers and students of first year courses

struggling.

In this paper we describe an attempt to address this problem by

combining two existing systems that partly address our needs.

We describe an integration of JUnit into BlueJ, which creates a

testing tool that exhibits the flexibility and ease-of-use of the

BlueJ system combined with the structured unit test approach

provided by JUnit.