Software Testing as Medium for Peer Feedback.

Peer feedback has been shown to benefit students’ learning as it develops their critical thinking and provides more immediate feedback. It relies on the analysis by students of their peers’ work following structured criteria. We propose to apply the same principle to programming courses but in doing so by using techniques of software evaluation: software testing. Students run tests on their peers’ code and engage in peer feedback discussions on the results of the test runs. In this paper we present a testing-based code peer feedback learning activity, we describe its technical framework and integration with GitLab, and we discuss its deployment in an undergraduate course and initial evaluation.