12 research outputs found
Teaching programming to beginners in a massive open online course
The University of Reading’s first Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) “Begin Programming: Build your first mobile game” (#FLMobiGame) was offered in Autumn 2013 on the FutureLearn platform. This course used a simple Android game framework to present basic programming concepts to complete beginners. The course attracted wide interest from all age groups.
The course presented opportunities and challenges to both participants and educators. While some participants had difficulties accessing content some others had trouble grasping the concepts and applying them in a real program. Managing forums was cumbersome with the limited facilities supported by the Beta-platform. A healthy community was formed around the course with the support of social media. The case study reported here is part of an ongoing research programme exploring participants’ MOOC engagement and experience using a grounded, ethnographical approach
Using control flow analysis to improve the effectiveness of incremental mutation testing
Incremental Mutation Testing attempts to make mutation testing
less expensive by applying it incrementally to a system as it evolves.
This approach fits current trends of iterative software development
with the main idea being that by carrying out mutation analysis in
frequent bite-sized chunks focused on areas of the code which have
changed, one can build confidence in the adequacy of a test suite
incrementally. Yet this depends on how precisely one can characterise the effects of a change to a program. The original technique
uses a naïve approach whereby changes are characterised only by
syntactic changes. In this paper we propose bolstering incremental
mutation testing by using control flow analysis to identify semantic
repercussions which a syntactic change will have on a system. Our
initial results based on two case studies demonstrate that numerous
relevant mutants which would have otherwise not been considered
using the naïve approach, are now being generated. However, the
cost of identifying these mutants is significant when compared to
the naïve approach, although it remains advantageous when compared to traditional mutation testing so long as the increment is
sufficiently small.peer-reviewe
Exploring the link between test suite quality and automatic specification inference
While no one doubts the importance of correct and complete specifications, many industrial systems
still do not have formal specifications written out — and even when they do, it is hard to check their
correctness and completeness. This work explores the possibility of using an invariant extraction tool
such as Daikon to automatically infer specifications from available test suites with the idea of aiding
software engineers to improve the specifications by having another version to compare to. Given that
our initial experiments did not produce satisfactory results, in this paper we explore which test suite
attributes influence the quality of the inferred specification. Following further study, we found that
instruction, branch and method coverage are correlated to high recall values, reaching up to 97.93%.peer-reviewe
Automatically generating runtime monitors from tests
A large portion of the software development industry relies on testing as the main technique for quality assurance while other techniques which can provide extra guarantees are largely ignored. A case in point is runtime verification which provides assurance that a system’s behaviour is correct at runtime. Compared to testing, this technique has the advantage of checking the actual runs of a system rather than a number of representative testcases.peer-reviewe
Dimethyl fumarate in patients admitted to hospital with COVID-19 (RECOVERY): a randomised, controlled, open-label, platform trial
Dimethyl fumarate (DMF) inhibits inflammasome-mediated inflammation and has been proposed as a treatment for patients hospitalised with COVID-19. This randomised, controlled, open-label platform trial (Randomised Evaluation of COVID-19 Therapy [RECOVERY]), is assessing multiple treatments in patients hospitalised for COVID-19 (NCT04381936, ISRCTN50189673). In this assessment of DMF performed at 27 UK hospitals, adults were randomly allocated (1:1) to either usual standard of care alone or usual standard of care plus DMF. The primary outcome was clinical status on day 5 measured on a seven-point ordinal scale. Secondary outcomes were time to sustained improvement in clinical status, time to discharge, day 5 peripheral blood oxygenation, day 5 C-reactive protein, and improvement in day 10 clinical status. Between 2 March 2021 and 18 November 2021, 713 patients were enroled in the DMF evaluation, of whom 356 were randomly allocated to receive usual care plus DMF, and 357 to usual care alone. 95% of patients received corticosteroids as part of routine care. There was no evidence of a beneficial effect of DMF on clinical status at day 5 (common odds ratio of unfavourable outcome 1.12; 95% CI 0.86-1.47; p = 0.40). There was no significant effect of DMF on any secondary outcome
Thigh-length compression stockings and DVT after stroke
Controversy exists as to whether neoadjuvant chemotherapy improves survival in patients with invasive bladder cancer, despite randomised controlled trials of more than 3000 patients. We undertook a systematic review and meta-analysis to assess the effect of such treatment on survival in patients with this disease