People

Faculty Members

Viera K. Proulx
Professor
PhD, Columbia University

vkp@ccs.neu.edu
Personal Home Page

Professor Proulx focuses on curricula, pedagogy, and the development of teaching materials and supporting software for teaching software design at all levels.

As a part of the TeachScheme/ReachJava team, she has taken the lead in developing the curriculum for a course that focuses on program design in class-based languages; designing assignments, laboratory materials, and lecture notes. She has led a number of summer faculty development workshops disseminating this curriculum to colleagues throughout the country.

Her research focuses on the correctness of unit tests, specifically the problem-appropriate definition of equality. She is currently developing testing software that allows programmers to define a wide variety of testing scenarios with customized equality checks and detailed reporting of the results. The software is designed to provide a gradual learning curve for programmers starting at the novice level, extending to the seasoned practitioner. This project combines research into semantics of test design and evaluation with development of teaching materials that integrate test-first design into all levels of program design curricula.