Automated programming assignment grading tools have become integral to CS courses at introductory as well as advanced levels. However a lot of these tools have their own custom approaches to setting up assignments and describing how solutions should be tested, requiring instructors to make a significant learning investment to begin using a new tool. In addition, differences between tools mean that initial investment must be repeated when switching tools or adding a new one. Worse still, tool-specific strategies further reduce the ability of educators to share and reuse their assignments. As a solution to this problem, we describe our experiences working with PEML, the Programming Exercise Markup Language, which provides an easy to use, instructor friendly approach for writing programming assignments. Unlike tool-oriented data interchange formats, PEML is designed to provide a human friendly authoring format that has been developed to be intuitive, expressive and not be a technological or notational barrier to instructors. We describe the design of PEML and also discuss its implementation as a programming library, a web application, and a microservice that provides full parsing and rendering capabilities for easy integration into any tools or scripting libraries. We also describe the integration of PEML into two automated testing and grading tools used at Virginia Tech by the CS department: Code Workout and Web-CAT. We then describe our experiences using PEML to describe a full range of programming assignments, laboratory exercises, and small coding questions of varying complexity in demonstrating the practicality of the notation. We evaluate the feasibility of PEML using this encoding exercise as well as the effect of its integration into the aforementioned automated grading tools. We finally present a framework for integrating PEML into existing grading tools and then draw our conclusions as well as list down avenues PEML can be expanded into in the future. / Master of Science / Automated grading tools have become ubiquitous to CS courses focused on programming concepts at both the undergraduate as well as graduate level. These tools allow instructors to provide near instant feedback to students as well as spend more time focusing on the curriculum rather than grading. However, these tools use a variety programming assignment representation formats and without a standardized representation, instructors and educators may struggle to share and reuse assignments across different tools and platforms. To address this need, we have developed the Programming Exercise Markup Language (PEML), a standardized format for representing programming exercises, designed to be human-friendly as well as easy to learn and use. PEML includes information about the problem statement, input and output formats, constraints, and sample test cases, and can be used for a wide range of exercise types and programming languages. As part of this master's thesis project, we encoded 50 assignments of varying size and difficulty into PEML as well as integrated support for PEML into Web-CAT and Code Workout, two commonly used automated grading tools used at Virginia Tech. Building upon our experience performing this task, we also designed a framework that can be utilized when integrating PEML into other automated grading tools. By providing a standardized way of representing programming assignments, PEML can help to streamline programming education and make it easier for instructors and educators to create and share assignments across different tools and platforms.

Today, society is ever-increasing in its use of technology and computers. The increase in technology creates a need for different programming languages with unique properties. The creation of a system may require multiple languages for multiple processes that need to transfer data between one another. There are several solutions for sharing data between processes with their respective strengths and weaknesses. The differences create a problem of needing to understand the data transfer solutions to use them effectively. This thesis addresses the problem of there not existing any guidelines for data transfer solutions. The purpose is to create guidelines for choosing a data transfer solution. The goal is to help software developers find a data transfer solution that fits their needs. The thesis is meant to inform and contribute to the understanding of possible solutions for sharing data between processes. A literature study and practical study were needed to get that understanding. The literature study was conducted to understand the solutions and to be able to compare them. After that, a practical study was performed to work with the solutions and gain experience. The study was meant to gain measurements for later comparisons of data transfer solutions. The measurements followed the comparative criteria of speed , resource usage , and language support . The result was the creation of guidelines that displayed different scenarios based on the comparative criteria. For each situation, there was a recommendation of solutions that would help in the given situation. These results accomplished the goal and purpose by providing guidelines that could help software developers choose a data transfer solution. / Användningen av olika teknologier och datorer ökar konstant i dagens samhälle. Detta skapar ett behov av olika programmeringsspråk med olika egenskaper. Ett projekt kan kräver flera språk för olika processer, så kan programmen behöva kommunicera genom att överföra data sinsemellan. Det finns olika dataöverföringslösningar för att dela data och de har sina svagheter och styrkor. Skillnaderna skapar problemet att en användare behöver förstå dataöverföringslösningar för att använda dem effektivt. Avhandlingen tar upp problemet att det inte finns några riktlinjer för dataöverföringslösningar. Syftet med avhandlingen är att skapa riktlinjer för att välja en dataöverföringslösning. Målet med avhandlingen är att hjälpa mjukvaruutvecklare att välja en dataöverföringslösning som passar deras behov. Avhandlingen är menad att informera och att bidra till förståelsen av dataöverföringslösningar. Därför krävdes det både en litteraturstudie och en praktisk studie. Litteraturstudien utfördes för att få en förståelse för de olika lösningarna och kunna jämföra dem. Den praktiska studien utfördes för att arbeta med lösningarna och lära sig om dem. Arbetet var menat att ta fram mätvärden för att kunna jämföra dataöverföringslösningar. Mätvärdena följde jämnförelsekriterierna hastighet, resursanvändning, och tillgängliga språk. Resultatet av avhandlingen var skapandet av riktlinjerna. Riktlinjerna visar olika situationer baserade på jämförelsekriterierna. För varje situation rekommenderas det en dataöverföringslösning som hjälpte i situationen. Resultatet uppnådde syftet och målet med avhandlingen genom att skapa riktlinjer som hjälper mjukvaruutvecklare att välja dataöverföringslösningar.