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SAPA

Supporting Assessment of Programming Assignments

Contact Prof. Dr. rer. nat. Volker Turau
Staff Christoph Weyer
Start 1. October 2007
End 1. January 2009
Financing European Consortium of Innovative Universities

Project Description

The goal of the SAPA project is to develop a tool, which automates the supervision of many steps in the software development process. To provide feedback to students the results of this supervision process are aggregated and made available to tutors and students of these courses. This allows tutors to make dedicated suggestions for improvements to students and fosters a consistent evaluation of programs by different tutors of a course.

The SAPA tool will be build with an existing versioning system as the backbone. The usage of a version control system has the positive side-effect that tutors can supervise the progress students make during the software development process. Furthermore, the contributions of the individual team members are made visible enabling a fairer assessment. Another benefit of versioning systems is that they allow enforcing compliance with deadlines. To assess programs various software metrics will be integrated into the systems. When a student checks in a program the tool will calculate the metrics for this assignment and based on these results a report will be generated and made available to the submitter. The design of the tool provides the flexibility to assess programs in different programming languages using different metrics. Currently the programming language C is supported. The following range of metrics are available:

The tool offers a simple plug-in mechanism to introduce new metrics into the system. There is a web-based front-end for students and tutors available.