Introducing tcframe: A Simple and Robust Test Cases Generation Framework

Preparing test cases is a vital step in a programming contest. Creating all test cases manually by hand is hard and error-prone, so they should be generated by programs. There have been several attempts at creating a framework for test cases generation, that involve writing a generator program that generates the test cases, and a validator program that validates whether the produced test cases conform to the constraints. This paper proposes a simpler yet robust framework, called tcframe, for generating test cases especially for programming contest problems. The proposed approach involves writing a single self-validating C++ generator program as opposed to writing two separate programs. The framework API is designed in such a way that the resulting generator program is easy to read and modify. Using this framework, programming contest organizers can produce generator programs with a consistent and similar structure across all problems.