Investigating code quality tools in the context of software engineering education

Abstract

A key issue involved with software engineering education consists of how to guarantee that adequate software engineering principles are being followed at the code level, thus reinforcing that students produce high‐quality code. Reviewing and grading student projects to verify whether they followed such principles is a time‐consuming task, since this typically involves manual code inspection. In this paper, we exploit code quality tools and metrics to automatically assess student projects with respect to methods with many responsibilities (i.e., where the Extract Method refactoring should be applied), and evaluate their effectiveness. We conducted a study using two sets of student projects, developed in two academic semesters. Our results indicate that, to reduce the effort required to grade projects, two traditional code metrics, namely method lines of code and number of statements, perform best, and other metrics can be selected according to the system being implemented.