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

Stoecklin, Sara; Smith, Suzanne; Serino, Catharina

doi:10.1145/1227310.1227364

Cited by 12 publications

(4 citation statements)

References 18 publications

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“…The study suggests a set of tasks, such as reading texts, comprehension of refactoring catalogs, and practical exercises. Other studies discuss approaches and lessons to promote refactoring practices [Stoecklin et al 2007, Hebig et al 2020. There are also tools to improve the student's perception of refactoring [Agrahari and Chimalakonda 2020].…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Understanding Refactoring Tasks over Time: A Study Using Refactoring Graphs

Brito¹,

Hora²,

Valente³

2022

Anais Do XXV Congresso Ibero-Americano Em Engenharia De Software (CIbSE 2022)

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Refactoring is a fundamental practice in modern software development. Therefore, it is essential that practitioners have a solid understanding of refactoring, both in theory and in practice. In this paper, we rely on a graph-based abstraction — called refactoring graphs — to visualize and analyze refactorings performed by students in a canonical refactoring application: the Video Store System, proposed by Fowler. We asked 46 students to perform the refactorings included in this example under two scenarios: according to a list of explicit guidelines, where most students performed the tasks successfully; and by using flexible ones, in which a part of the students faced problems identifying the appropriate operations. We conclude by presenting discussions and implications.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Understanding Refactoring Tasks over Time: A Study Using Refactoring Graphs

Brito¹,

Hora²,

Valente³

2022

Anais Do XXV Congresso Ibero-Americano Em Engenharia De Software (CIbSE 2022)

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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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“…In a broader context, also teaching of refactoring without integrated automated feedback is related to our approach. For instance, Smith et al propose an incremental approach for teaching different refactoring types on college level in terms of learning lessons [35,36]. The tasks are designed in an instructive way with exemplary solutions that have to be transferred to the current synthetic smell.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Serious Refactoring Games

Haendler

Neumann

2019

Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences

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Software design issues can severely impede software development and maintenance. Thus, it is important for the success of software projects that developers are aware of bad smells in code artifacts and improve their skills to reduce these issues via refactoring. However, software refactoring is a complex activity and involves multiple tasks and aspects. Therefore, imparting competences for identifying bad smells and refactoring code efficiently is challenging for software engineering education and training. The approaches proposed for teaching software refactoring in recent years mostly concentrate on small and artificial tasks and fall short in terms of higher level competences, such as analysis and evaluation. In this paper, we investigate the possibilities and challenges of designing serious games for software refactoring on real-world code artifacts. In particular, we propose a game design, where students can compete either against a predefined benchmark (technical debt) or against each other. In addition, we describe a lightweight architecture as the technical foundation for the game design that integrates pre-existing analysis tools such as test frameworks and software-quality analyzers. Finally, we provide an exemplary game scenario to illustrate the application of serious games in a learning setting.

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

Cited by 12 publications

References 18 publications

Understanding Refactoring Tasks over Time: A Study Using Refactoring Graphs

Understanding Refactoring Tasks over Time: A Study Using Refactoring Graphs

How Teachers Would Help Students to Improve Their Code

Serious Refactoring Games

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