"I know it when I see it" Perceptions of Code Quality

Abstract

Context. Code quality is a key issue in software development. The ability to develop high quality software is therefore a key learning goal of computing programs. However, there are no universally accepted measures to assess the quality of code and current standards are considered weak. Furthermore, there are many facets to code quality. Defining and explaining the concept of code quality is therefore a challenge faced by many educators. Objectives. In this working group, we investigated code quality as perceived by students, educators, and professional developers, in particular, the differences in their views of code quality and which quality aspects they consider as more or less important. Furthermore, we investigated their sources for information about code quality and its assessment. Methods. We interviewed 34 students, educators and professional developers regarding their perceptions of code quality. For the interviews they brought along code from their own experience to discuss and exemplify code quality.Results. There was no common definition of code quality among * Working group co-leaders:

How Teachers Would Help Students to Improve Their Code

“…An ITiCSE working group [5] investigated which quality aspects are considered important by teachers, students and developers. In our study we zoom in on how teachers assess the quality of student code, focussing on data-, statement-and routine-level refactorings, which are most relevant for the programs that beginners write.…”

Fostering Program Comprehension in Novice Programmers - Learning Activities and Learning Trajectories

“…What constitutes good code is still an open question, but recent studies presentevidence that students, teachers, and professional developers usually associate good code to "readable" or "comprehensible" code[34]. Usually, one crucial component of readability is the structure of the code or its plan-composition strategy.…”

Teaching the Culture of Quality from the Ground Up: Novice-tailored Quality Improvement for Scratch Programmers

“…Keuning et al identified several code quality issues in a large dataset of student-authored Java programs, as well as the undisciplined practices that led to these issues 3 . Through interviews, Börstler et al uncovered that students possess a low degree of skills and knowledge about code quality, concluding that code quality should be discussed more in CS education programs 1 . Other works focus on developing guidelines that help educators give code improvement feedback to students 4,2 . In the context of Scratch, the early works that explore code quality focus on identifying code quality problems 10,11,12,13 and applying program analysis tools to help educators better understand the quality of programs written by novice programmers 14,15,16 .…”

“…The CS Education research literature has established the importance of teaching software quality as part of the CS curriculum 1,2,3,4 . However, it remains subject to considerable debate whether the topic of software quality is appropriate for introductory learners.…”

“…The unique aspect of our study was teaching the very fundamentals of programming simultaneously with the principles and mechanics of refactoring and automated refactoring support required to remove code duplication. In particular, the study participants went through a learning experience, guided by an online interactive tutorial that taught them EXTRACT CUSTOM BLOCK 1 , the refactoring transformation that replaces duplicate code snippets with calls to a custom block. In Scratch, the custom block construct reifies procedural abstraction; it mimics the functionality of a procedure in text-based languages, having a unique name, parameters, and a body of statements.…”