An innovative approach to teaching refactoring

Smith, Suzanne; Stoecklin, Sara; Serino, Catharina

doi:10.1145/1121341.1121451

Cited by 9 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 7 publications

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“…However, it is rarely taught in the computer science curriculum, and few guidelines or pedagogical approaches exist for how to teach these concepts. This paper is a continuation of a previous paper [20] published at SIGCSE2006. That paper introduced an innovative pedagogical approach to systematically and incrementally teaching refactoring.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 75%

Teaching students to build well formed object-oriented methods through refactoring

Stoecklin

Smith

Serino

2007

Proceedings of the 38th SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education

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Refactoring is the process of transforming the internal structure of existing code while keeping the integrity of the code's functional requirements. Refactoring is proven to increase program maintainability, flexibility, and understandability and is recognized as a best practice in the software development community. However, with the exception of courses or lectures on extreme programming, refactoring is overlooked in the computer science curriculum. This paper presents the fourth lesson of an innovative pedagogical approach to teaching refactoring on the college level. This lesson covers the creation of well formed object-oriented methods including characteristics for evaluating such methods. Through this hands-on approach, building well formed object-oriented methods through refactoring can be better understood and integrated into the computer science curriculum.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 75%

Teaching students to build well formed object-oriented methods through refactoring

Stoecklin

Smith

Serino

2007

Proceedings of the 38th SIGCSE Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

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“…They illustrated the applicability of the example by applying various tools supporting different aspects of the refactoring process. Smith et al [25] introduced an incremental approach for teaching refactoring at the college level. Through their hands‐on approach, refactoring could become an integral component in the computer science (CS) curriculum and an innovative means of reinforcing good development practices.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Refactoring‐based learning for fine‐grained lock in concurrent programming course

Zhang

2021

Comp Applic In Engineering

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Fine‐grained lock is frequently used to mitigate lock contention in the multithreaded program running on a shared‐memory multicore processor. However, a concurrent program based on the fine‐grained lock is hard to write, especially for beginners in the concurrent programming course. How to help participants learn fine‐grained lock has become increasingly important and urgent. To this end, this paper presents a novel refactoring‐based approach to enhance the learning effectiveness of fine‐grained locks. Two refactoring tools are introduced to provide illustrating examples for participants by converting original coarse‐grained locks into fine‐grained ones automatically. Learning effectiveness and limitations are discussed when refactoring tools are applied. We evaluate students' outcomes with two benchmarks and compare their performance in Fall 2018 with those in Fall 2019. We also conduct experiments on students' outcomes by dividing them into two groups (A and B) in a controlled classroom where participants in group A learn the fine‐grained locks with the help of refactoring tools while those in group B do not access these tools. Evaluation of the results when they have been taught with the refactoring‐based approach reveals a significant improvement in the students' learning.

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“…Educators have designed several projects that teach students about refactoring, usually for more advanced students [1,9,17,19]. Experienced educators studied the quality of object-oriented examples in Java textbooks [4].…”

Section: Code Quality In Educationmentioning

confidence: 99%

How Teachers Would Help Students to Improve Their Code

Keuning

Heeren

Jeuring

2019

Proceedings of the 2019 ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education

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Code quality has been receiving less attention than program correctness in both the practice of and research into programming education. Writing poor quality code might be a sign of carelessness, or not fully understanding programming concepts and language constructs. Teachers play an important role in addressing quality issues, and encouraging students to write better code as early as possible.In this paper we explore to what extent teachers address code quality in their teaching, which code quality issues they observe and how they would help novices to improve their code. We presented student code of low quality to 30 experienced teachers and asked them which hints they would give and how the student should improve the code step by step. We compare these hints to the output of professional code quality tools.Although most teachers gave similar hints on reducing the algorithmic complexity and removing clutter, they gave varying subsets of hints on other topics. We found a large variety in how they would solve issues in code. We noticed that professional code quality tools do not point out the algorithmic complexity topics that teachers mention. Finally, we give some general guidelines on how to approach code improvement.

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An innovative approach to teaching refactoring

Cited by 9 publications

References 7 publications

Teaching students to build well formed object-oriented methods through refactoring

Teaching students to build well formed object-oriented methods through refactoring

Refactoring‐based learning for fine‐grained lock in concurrent programming course

How Teachers Would Help Students to Improve Their Code

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