A Study of Integer Input Test Data Generation for Validating Basic C Programs

In many universities around the world, C programming is taught in basic programming or software courses.To assist self-studies of novice students, we have developed a C programming learning assistant system (CPLAS).CPLAS provides code writing problem (CWP) that asks students to write source codes that will generate the expected outputs to given inputs.To assist teachers at marking the submitted codes, we have implemented the code validation function that automatically checks their correctness through compiling codes, running them, and comparing outputs with expected ones.However, since the input and output data are manually generated and the test data is limited, it may miss incomplete codes.It is necessary to dynamically generate different test data to avoid it.In this paper, we present a test data generation to automatically generate new test data for source codes that accept integer inputs.For evaluations, we used source codes for 10 C programming assignments submitted from first-year undergraduate students in a course and confirmed the correctness of the proposal.