The aim of this project was to implement a series of improvements to an existing Randomized Quiz System in use in Macquarie University, so that it can fulfil its potential as a pedagogical tool for the lecturer and a self-learning tool for the students.

These changes were gradually implemented using an iterative development process and test driven development techniques.

Virtualization was used to set up a server environment with similar characteristics to the target platform.

A test harness was created to be able to analyse the current state of the system, document it, avoid the introduction of any bugs after our changes were completed, and to provide a baseline for new developers studying the system.

Then new modules were developed with the objective of improving the usability of the system and to provide more business value to its users. Finally the performance of the system was measured and changes were made in its architecture with the objective of a better response time and an overall improved user experience.

Now lecturers have a very user friendly editor that they can use to produce quickly prototype and test programming questions.

The new architecture of the system provides a significant improvement in response time and performance of the application.

The changes in the architecture and the extensive test suite provide a foundation for future developers to further improve and extend the system.