The goal of the tester library provides a support for test-first design and unit testing in Java that is easily accessible to a novice programmer — with no new syntax, no new concepts other than what is normally covered in every introductory curriculum. The sample data and the test methods are defined in an Examples class that basically plays the role of the client to the programmer’s code.

The tester library also provides a gradual transition to designing unit tests using professional-level tools, such as JUnit by allowing a more advanced programmer to design a variety of equality comparisons.

The library has been used at a number of universities, colleges, and high schools over more than five years, in a variety of Java-based introductory courses. as well as in more advanced software development courses.

The tester library is published under the LGPL license. The sources, documentation, and downloads, as well as additional resources as well as a community space is hosted here. The JavaLib educational site at

http://www.ccs.neu.edu/javalib/Tester/index.html

provides additional information, detailed user's guide, instructions for running tests and for setting up the environment for the IDEs typically used in educational settings.