Experimental evaluation in computer science: a quantitative study
Journal of Systems and Software
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The undergraduate operating systems course can provide students with a valuable introduction to empirical testing and experimentation. This paper announces the availability of a process scheduling simulator designed to develop student empirical skills while they are learning part of the standard operating systems curriculum. The simulator is written in Java and available for direct experimentation via the World Wide Web. By accessing the remote URL through an appletviewer, students can permanently save input test data and simulator results generated in HTML format. Students are asked to test specified hypotheses about process scheduling and to develop their own hypotheses about the influence of different parameters on behavior. In order to devise experiments that make sense, students must understand how factors such as burst time and variability influence behavior. Interested faculty are invited to try the simulator and support materials in their operating systems classes.