James Perretta is a 4th year Ph.D. student in the Programming Research Laboratory at Northeastern University advised by Jonathan Bell and Arjun Guha. His research interests lie at the intersection of software engineering and computer science education, with particular interest in software testing. His current research is focused on lowering the human effort required to develop and deploy programming assignments that emphasize software testing while also providing higher-quality testing-focused feedback to students.

Publications & Grants

Instructor-Written Hints as Automated Test Suite Quality Feedback.
James Perretta, Andrew DeOrio, Arjun Guha, and Jonathan Bell. Special Interest Group on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE) Technical Symposium 2025.

A Tool for Mutation Analysis in Racket
Bambi Zhuang, James Perretta, Arjun Guha, and Jonathan Bell. 16th IEEE International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation (ICST), April 2023.

Khoury College Teaching Innovation Grant, 2022. Funded undergraduate student researcher on "Mutation Analysis in Racket" project.

On the Use of Mutation Analysis For Evaluating Student Test Suite Quality
James Perretta, Andrew DeOrio, Arjun Guha, and Jonathan Bell. International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA), July 2022.

Human vs. Automated Coding Style Grading in Computing Education
James Perretta, Westley Weimer, and Andrew DeOrio. American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE), June 2019.

Teaching Software Testing with Automated Feedback
James Perretta and Andrew DeOrio. American Society of Engineering Education (ASEE), June 2018.

Software

James is the creator and lead developer of Autograder.io, an open-source automated grading system that supports over 5000 students per semester across more than a dozen courses at the University of Michigan.