1.1 Problem Statement

The general problems to be addressed by the Test Tool project are as follows:

• to provide a reliable and easy to use software tool to generate classroom-style tests
• to provide a tool to administer tests to individual students on individual "slave" computers from a central "master" computer
• to provide an interface to assist the administrator of the tests by allowing automated scripts to quickly grade and annotate individual student tests

While these problems have been solved by a number of commercially available and public domain products, the Test Tool provides a solution with certain functional improvements over existing tools. Specific problem areas are the following:

• providing an interface to allow scripts to auto-grade code snippets
• providing an exceptionally easy to use test-profiler to allow varying degrees of control over the creation of tests
• providing a single suite of tools to streamline the creation, administration, and grading of tests

The Test Tool project addresses the requirements of a particular customer. This customer needs a tool with a collection of features not available in any single existing tool. The aspect of the problem is one of combining a set of existing features in a way that the features have yet to be combined in another product.

In addition to the development of functioning software, the Test Tool project focuses on one additional problem not addressed in commercial tools:

• to provide an opportunity for students of CPE 308 to learn common best practices for software development