Tester

The Tester is a Lisp test-harness allowing for the automated testing of students' exercise solutions.

Each student's submission is placed in a single lisp file (see student.lisp for an example) within a submissions directory (configurable in defs-n-paths.lisp). When the Tester is run it produces, for each student's submission, an HTML log and a score.

This sample uses the HTML Generator sample. A copy of the code - htout.lisp - is included with this sample.

Source Files

The Tester consists of the following source files:

htout.lisp - HTML generation
pkg.lisp - package definitions
defs-n-paths.lisp - path definitions & macro definitions for the tests
defex-user.lisp - definitions used within student submissions
hello-world-solution.lisp, add2-solution.lisp - sample solutions for the sample tests
tests.lisp - the sample tests
run-tests.lisp - the main test-harness code
submissions/student.lisp - a sample student submission
load.lisp - compiles and loads all the other files
sysdcl.lisp - Allegro CL defsystem

Click on the above links to browse the source or use your browser to save the files to your local machine. Alternatively, you can download all the source code as a single gzip'd archive.

Quick Start

Download and extract the source code above, start Lisp, change the current directory to the extracted tester directory, and load load.lisp. (If you're using Allegro CL, you may choose to use excl:defsystem - load sysdcl.lisp, and run (load-system :tester).)

From the Lisp prompt, execute (solution-tests:run-tests). The Tester produces two files:

submission-logs/student.html - a log of the tests run for each student
submission-scores/student.html - a scorecard for each student

You can make configuration changes in defs-n-paths.lisp or create your own tests using tests.lisp as a template. You may use submissions/student.lisp as a template for your students to submit their own solutions to your tests as well. You should also browse the source code and take a look at Using the Tester which goes into greater detail on how to write good tests.