168,109 research outputs found
Towards property-based testing of RESTful web services
Developing APIs as Web Services over HTTP implies adding an extra layer to software, compared to the ones that we would need to develop an API distributed as, for example, a library. This additional layer must be included in testing too, but this implies that the software under test has an additional complexity due both to the need to use an intermediate protocol in tests and to the need to test compliance with the constraints imposed by that protocol: in this case the constraints defined by the REST architectural style. On the other hand, these requirements are common to all the Web Services, and because of that, we should be able to abstract this aspect of the testing model so that we can reuse it in testing any Web Service. In this paper, as a first step towards automating the testing of Web Services over HTTP, we describe a practical mechanism and model for testing RESTful Web Services without side effects and give an example of how we successfully adapted that mechanism to test two different existing Web Services: Storage Room by Thriventures and Google Tasks by Google. For this task we have used Erlang together with state machine models in the property-based testing tool Quviq QuickCheck, implemented using the statem module. 1
Media Usage in Post-Secondary Education and Implications for Teaching and Learning
The Web 2.0 has permeated academic life. The use of online information
services in post-secondary education has led to dramatic changes in faculty
teaching methods as well as in the learning and study behavior of students. At
the same time, traditional information media, such as textbooks and printed
handouts, still form the basic pillars of teaching and learning. This paper
reports the results of a survey about media usage in teaching and learning
conducted with Western University students and instructors, highlighting trends
in the usage of new and traditional media in higher education by instructors
and students. In addition, the survey comprises part of an international
research program in which 20 universities from 10 countries are currently
participating. Further, the study will hopefully become a part of the ongoing
discussion of practices and policies that purport to advance the effective use
of media in teaching and learning
Evaluating the retrieval effectiveness of Web search engines using a representative query sample
Search engine retrieval effectiveness studies are usually small-scale, using
only limited query samples. Furthermore, queries are selected by the
researchers. We address these issues by taking a random representative sample
of 1,000 informational and 1,000 navigational queries from a major German
search engine and comparing Google's and Bing's results based on this sample.
Jurors were found through crowdsourcing, data was collected using specialised
software, the Relevance Assessment Tool (RAT). We found that while Google
outperforms Bing in both query types, the difference in the performance for
informational queries was rather low. However, for navigational queries, Google
found the correct answer in 95.3 per cent of cases whereas Bing only found the
correct answer 76.6 per cent of the time. We conclude that search engine
performance on navigational queries is of great importance, as users in this
case can clearly identify queries that have returned correct results. So,
performance on this query type may contribute to explaining user satisfaction
with search engines
Visualizing networked writing activity
In conjunction with the Honors Fellow program and two faculty advisors from both the English and Computer Science departments, another student and I have written software to visualize how participants collaborate on networked writing projects. Using Google Docs as a way to allow students to instantaneously interact with a document in real-time, this software captures data from Google's cloud service and displays it in a pair of visualizations. We used agile methods of software development to devise a way to implement their ideas in an appealing way. This document contains detailed instructions on where the latest iteration of the software can be located. It also details the process of making the system operational on a new machine, stating how the software works and where it should be placed in the file system. The document also explains how one can use the system to visualize writing collaboration. Finally, many failed iterations of the software have led to meaningful reflections on software development practices. The document serves as a technical report for the software, but also elaborates on the hardships of development, as well as provides insight on how this software may evolve toward richer experiences. Also included is an Author's Statement which reveals many of the learning experiences that arose throughout the development of this project.Honors CollegeThesis (B.?.
Is the Stack Distance Between Test Case and Method Correlated With Test Effectiveness?
Mutation testing is a means to assess the effectiveness of a test suite and
its outcome is considered more meaningful than code coverage metrics. However,
despite several optimizations, mutation testing requires a significant
computational effort and has not been widely adopted in industry. Therefore, we
study in this paper whether test effectiveness can be approximated using a more
light-weight approach. We hypothesize that a test case is more likely to detect
faults in methods that are close to the test case on the call stack than in
methods that the test case accesses indirectly through many other methods.
Based on this hypothesis, we propose the minimal stack distance between test
case and method as a new test measure, which expresses how close any test case
comes to a given method, and study its correlation with test effectiveness. We
conducted an empirical study with 21 open-source projects, which comprise in
total 1.8 million LOC, and show that a correlation exists between stack
distance and test effectiveness. The correlation reaches a strength up to 0.58.
We further show that a classifier using the minimal stack distance along with
additional easily computable measures can predict the mutation testing result
of a method with 92.9% precision and 93.4% recall. Hence, such a classifier can
be taken into consideration as a light-weight alternative to mutation testing
or as a preceding, less costly step to that.Comment: EASE 201
Big Data as a Technology-to-think-with for Scientific Literacy
This research aimed to identify indications of scientific literacy resulting
from a didactic and investigative interaction with Google Trends Big Data
software by first-year students from a high-school in Novo Hamburgo, Southern
Brazil. Both teaching strategies and research interpretations lie on four
theoretical backgrounds. Firstly, Bunge's epistemology, which provides a
thorough characterization of Science that was central to our study. Secondly,
the conceptual framework of scientific literacy of Fives et al. that makes our
teaching focus precise and concise, as well as supports one of our
methodological tool: the SLA (scientific literacy assessment). Thirdly, the
"crowdledge" construct from dos Santos, which gives meaning to our study when
as it makes the development of scientific literacy itself versatile for paying
attention on sociotechnological and epistemological contemporary phenomena.
Finally, the learning principles from Papert's Constructionism inspired our
educational activities. Our educational actions consisted of students, divided
into two classes, investigating phenomena chose by them. A triangulation
process to integrate quantitative and qualitative methods on the assessments
results was done. The experimental design consisted in post-tests only and the
experimental variable was the way of access to the world. The experimental
group interacted with the world using analyses of temporal and regional plots
of interest of terms or topics searched on Google. The control class did
'placebo' interactions with the world through on-site observations of
bryophytes, fungus or whatever in the schoolyard. As general results of our
research, a constructionist environment based on Big Data analysis showed
itself as a richer strategy to develop scientific literacy, compared to a free
schoolyard exploration.Comment: 23 pages, 2 figures, 8 table
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