Automating testing of students' code

[torvaney]

I'd second the use of a CI tool like travis-CI. I haven't any experience with Canvas, but travis has good integration with GitHub and there are lots of resources/tutorials/templates and the like to make getting started relatively painless.

It might also be worth taking a look at the testthat package (GitHub - r-lib/testthat: An R 📦 to make testing 😀), which although usually used for package development could perhaps be used for your needs here. I had a similar(?) question recently and this was recommended to me:

Testing R scripts/code outside of package development

You can run testthat tests without package structure, but it is less clean/convenient. I would put your test files in the same location as if you had already done the package conversion stuff. That means put test files into folder "tests/testthat". When you run tests on a package in Rstudio, you can just Ctrl-Shift-T, which automatically loads the package and then runs the tests in the appropriate place. If not a package you can do these steps manually: Prior to testing, load the functions you want to test and their dependencies. Source the function files and load packages, either manually or at the top of the test file. Then you can run testthat::test_dir("tests/testthat") which s…