STAGE: A software tool for automatic grading of testing exercises

We report on an approach and associated tool-support for automatically evaluating and grading exercises in Software Engineering courses, by connecting various third-party tools to the online learning platform Moodle. In the case study presented here, the tool was used in several instances of a lecture course to automatically measure the test coverage criteria wrt. the test cases defined by the students for given Java code. We report on empirical evidence gathered using this case-study (involving more than 250 students), including the results of a survey conducted after the exercises (which yielded positive feedback from the students), as well as a performance evaluation of our tool implementation.