[tusharsoni]

You make a good point to not use automated testing fully. I would highly recommend using some level of automated testing in every classroom.

Without automated testing, a lot of energy is spent on making sure the program runs and does what it's supposed to. Since students use all different kinds of environments (especially in beginner courses), just getting the program to run is a big challenge. Lint reports are great and I recommend adding them as part of the automated testing stack.

One huge advantage of automated testing is that students know before submitting that they understood the problem correctly, their program does what it's supposed to, and they are submitting it in the format that the instructor is expecting it in. A realtime feedback loop will always result in better submissions and grades.

Of course, once the basics are out of the way, instructors must look into the code to make an evaluation of whether the problem was solved the "right way" - whatever that means in the context of the course.

Source - I maintain a tool that automatically grades CS assignments and have collected a lot of data points over the last few years.