skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.

Explore Research Products in the PAR
It may take a few hours for recently added research products to appear in PAR search results.


Title: Teaching the culture of quality from the ground up: Novice-tailored quality improvement for scratch programmers.
As quality problems plague the modern society's software infrastructure, a fundamental learning objective of computing education has become developing students' attitudes, knowledge, and practices centered around software quality. Teaching software quality and its disciplined practices has thus far been limited to more advanced courses, due to the prevailing assumptions about the introductory learner's unpreparedness for the topic and potential negative impacts on learner motivation. In this paper, we present empirical evidence that starkly contradicts the established conventional belief. Specifically, by exploring how novice programmers learn to refactor code duplication with and without automated tools, we found strong evidence that novices grasp the importance of code quality and its improvement. This empirical evidence motivated us, in retrospect, to closely examine the design of our online interactive tutorial, a platform that drove our experimental user study. We identify and discuss the tutorial's key design principles and affirm their efficacy based on the observed learning experiences. The obtained insights can inform curricular interventions that introduce introductory students to code quality and its disciplined improvement practices.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1712131
PAR ID:
10179987
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
In 2020 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition. ASEE Conferences
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. ; ; (, IEEE/ACM 45th International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering Education and Training (ICSE-SEET))
    Static analysis tools are frequently used to scan the source code and detect deviations from the project coding guidelines. Given their importance, linters are often introduced to classrooms to educate students on how to detect and potentially avoid these code anti-patterns. However, little is known about their effectiveness in raising students’ awareness, given that these linters tend to generate a large number of false positives. To increase the awareness of potential coding issues that violate coding standards, in this paper, we aim to reflect on our experience with teaching the use of static analysis for the purpose of evaluating its effectiveness in helping students with respect to improving software quality. This paper discusses the results of an experiment in the classroom, over a period of 3 academic semesters, involving 65 submissions that carried out code review activity of 690 rules using PMD. The results of the quantitative and qualitative analysis show that the presence of a set of PMD quality issues influences the acceptance or rejection of the issues, design, and best practices-related categories that take longer time to be resolved, and students acknowledge the potential of using static analysis tools during code review. Through this experiment, code review can turn into a vital part of the educational computing plan. We envision our findings enabling educators to support students with code review strategies in order to raise students’ awareness about static analysis tools and scaffold their coding skills. 
    more » « less
  2. ; (, 2019 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC))
    Block-based programming has been overwhelmingly successful in revitalizing introductory computing education and in facilitating end-user development. However, poor code quality makes block-based programs hard to understand, modify, and reuse, thus hurting the educational and productivity effectiveness of blocks. There is great potential benefit in empowering programmers in this domain to systematically improve the code quality of their projects. Refactoring--improving code quality while preserving its semantics--has been widely adopted in traditional software development. In this work, we introduce refactoring to Scratch. We define four new Scratch refactorings: Extract Custom Block, Extract Parent Sprite, Extract Constant, and Reduce Variable Scope. To automate the application of these refactorings, we enhance the Scratch programming environment with powerful program analysis and transformation routines. To evaluate the utility of these refactorings, we apply them to remove the code smells detected in a representative dataset of 448 Scratch projects. We also conduct a between-subjects user study with 24 participants to assess how our refactoring tools impact programmers. Our results show that refactoring improves the subjects' code quality metrics, while our refactoring tools help motivate programmers to improve code quality. 
    more » « less
  3. ; ; ; ; (, ACM)
    The retrospective, or retro, is a fundamental component of the Agile process, widely used in both software engineering courses and industry. In a retro, teams come together at the end of a sprint to reflect on their team's performance. We conducted an empirical study to explore three research questions concerning retros in undergraduate team projects: (1) What do students reflect on? (2) What is the quality of their reflections? (3) How do teams' retros vary in terms of content and quality? Our study analyzed a corpus of 963 statements documented in the retros of 32 undergraduate software teams (n = 182 students) enrolled in four software engineering courses at two North American universities. A content analysis revealed that teams reflected most often on their work, communication, and collaboration practices. Nearly a third of teams' reflections focused on their general work practices, while nearly half focused on specific areas of the software development lifecycle---most prominently, pull requests, issues, and coding/testing/debugging. An analysis of the quality of teams' retro reflections showed that only 13% provided justification for a strategy to be stopped, continued, or started. An analysis of team-by-team results indicated significant differences in teams' retro content and quality. We compare these results to previous studies of retros in academia and industry, and consider their implications for software engineering education. 
    more » « less
  4. ; ; ; ; (, ACM)
    Infrastructure as code (IaC) is the practice of automatically managing computing platforms, such as Internet of Things (IoT) platforms. IaC has gained popularity in recent years, yielding a plethora of software artifacts, such as Ansible playbooks that are available on social coding platforms. Despite the availability of open source software (OSS) Ansible playbooks, there is a lack of empirical research on the quality of these playbooks, which can hinder the progress of IaC-related research. To that end, we conduct an empirical study with 2,952 OSS Ansible playbooks where we evaluate the quality of OSS playbooks from the perspective of executability, i.e., if publicly available OSS Ansible playbooks can be executed without failures. From our empirical study, we observe 71.5\% of the mined 2,952 Ansible playbooks cannot be executed as is because of four categories of failures. 
    more » « less
  5. (, ACM)
    Code quality is of universal concern among educators. Refactoring code, i.e., revising the structure of a program without changing its behavior is one approach for improving code quality. Numerous software tools have been created to help students refactor the code they write. Only a few software tutors have been reported in literature that help students proactively learn code quality by solving refactoring problems. But they suffer false positive and false negative grading issues because they allow freehand coding. We investigated whether refactoring tutors that do not allow freehand coding could be used to help students learn about non-trivial anti-patterns. We developed and deployed two software tutors for refactoring problems that are based on the principle of “refactoring without rewriting code”, and cover a subset of refactoring problems that can be solved using only deletion, duplication, reordering and token-wise editing of lines of code. We investigated whether students needed to learn the anti-patterns covered by the tutors and whether they benefited from using the tutors. In this experience report, we start by describing the tutors – the list of refactoring concepts covered, the user interface, grading, feedback and usage. We report our experience using the tutors over three semesters, which confirmed that both introductory and advanced students needed and benefited from using the tutors despite the limitations of the tutors’ coverage. We reflect on what worked and what did not. The tutors currently cover C++, Java and C#. They are available for free for educational use on the web at auglets.org. 
    more » « less
  • Citation Formats
  • MLA
  • APA
  • Chicago
  • BibTeX
  • Save / Share this Record
  • Send to Email