Automated Style Feedback for Advanced Beginner Java Programmers

FrenchPress is an Eclipse plug-in that partially automates the task of giving students feedback on their Java programs. It is designed not for novices but for students taking their second or third Java course: students who know enough Java to write a working program but lack the judgment to recognize bad code when they see it. FrenchPress does not diagnose compile-time or run-time errors, or logical errors that produce incorrect output. It targets silent flaws, flaws the student is unable to identify for himself because nothing in the programming environment alerts him. FrenchPress diagnoses flaws characteristic of programmers who have not yet assimilated the object-oriented idiom. Such shortcomings include misuse of the public modifier, fields that should have been local variables, and instance variables that should have been class constants. Other rules address the all too common misunderstanding of the boolean data type. FrenchPress delivers explanatory messages in a vocabulary appropriate for advanced beginners. FrenchPress does not fix the problems it detects; the student must decide whether to change the program. The plug-in has been tested by undergraduates in the UMass data structures and algorithms course, the target audience for FrenchPress diagnostics. A pilot study took place during winter break 2013-2014 and a preliminary classroom trial in Spring 2014. This dissertation reports results from the final classroom trial covering four programming assignments in Fall 2014. Among students whose code triggered one or more of the diagnostic rules, the percentage who modified their program in response to FrenchPress feedback varied from a high of 59% on the first project to a low of 23% on the second and fourth projects. User satisfaction surveys indicate that among students who said FrenchPress gave them suggestions for improvement, the percentage who found the feedback helpful bounced from around 55% on the first and third assignments to 32-40% on the second and fourth assignments. The lower acceptance on the second and fourth projects corresponds to a higher incidence of false positives and other confusing feedback messages. Nevertheless, the percentage of survey respondents who said they were satisfied with FrenchPress performance ranged from 56% to 66% on all four assignments

Automated Program Analysis for Novice Programmers

[EN] This paper describes how to adapt a static code analyzer to provide feedback novice programmers and their teachers. Current analyzers have been built to give feedback to experienced programmers who work on software projects or systems. The type of feedback and the type of analysis of these tools focusses on mistakes that are relevant within that context, and help with debugging software system. When teaching novice programmers this type of advice is often not particularly useful. It would be instead more useful to use these techniques to identify problem in the understanding of students of important programming concepts. This paper first explores in what respect static analyzers support the learning and teaching of programming, and what can be implemented based on existing static analysis technology. It presents an extension of static analyzer PMD to create feedback that is more valuable to novice programmers. To answer the question if these techniques are able to find conceptual mistakes that are characteristic for novice programmers make, we ran it over a number of student projects, and compared these results with publicly available mature software projects.Blok, T.; Fehnker, A. (2017). Automated Program Analysis for Novice Programmers. En Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Higher Education Advances. Editorial Universitat Politècnica de València. 1138-1146. https://doi.org/10.4995/HEAD17.2017.5533OCS1138114

Sprinter: A didactic linter for structured programming

Code linters are tools for detecting improper uses of programming constructs and violations of style issues. Despite that professional linters are available for numerous languages, they are not targeted to introductory programming, given their prescriptive nature that does not take into consideration a didactic viewpoint of learning programming fundamentals. We present Sprinter, a didactic code linter for structured programming supporting Java whose novelty aspects are twofold: (a) providing formative feedback on code with comprehensive explanatory messages (rather then prescriptive); (b) capability of detecting some control-flow issues to a deeper extent than professional linters. We review Sprinter features against popular tools, namely IntelliJ IDEA and Sonarlint.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

A Systematic Mapping Study of Code Quality in Education -- with Complete Bibliography

While functionality and correctness of code has traditionally been the main focus of computing educators, quality aspects of code are getting increasingly more attention. High-quality code contributes to the maintainability of software systems, and should therefore be a central aspect of computing education. We have conducted a systematic mapping study to give a broad overview of the research conducted in the field of code quality in an educational context. The study investigates paper characteristics, topics, research methods, and the targeted programming languages. We found 195 publications (1976-2022) on the topic in multiple databases, which we systematically coded to answer the research questions. This paper reports on the results and identifies developments, trends, and new opportunities for research in the field of code quality in computing education

A Systematic Mapping Study of Code Quality in Education -- with Complete Bibliography

While functionality and correctness of code has traditionally been the main focus of computing educators, quality aspects of code are getting increasingly more attention. High-quality code contributes to the maintainability of software systems, and should therefore be a central aspect of computing education. We have conducted a systematic mapping study to give a broad overview of the research conducted in the field of code quality in an educational context. The study investigates paper characteristics, topics, research methods, and the targeted programming languages. We found 195 publications (1976-2022) on the topic in multiple databases, which we systematically coded to answer the research questions. This paper reports on the results and identifies developments, trends, and new opportunities for research in the field of code quality in computing education