Integrating pedagogical code reviews into a CS 1 course: an empirical study

Formal code inspections are employed by teams of professional software engineers to identify software defects and improve the quality of software. After reviewing a piece of code individually, members of an inspection team come together to log the issues they have found, and to find new ones. Within the scope of a multi-institutional research project to adapt, refine, and evaluate studio-based learning methods in computing education, we are developing an adaptation of the formal code inspection called the pedagogical code review for use in lower-division computer science courses. In a pedagogical code review, a group of three to four students, led by a trained moderator, (a) walk through segments of each other's programming assignments, (b) check the code against a list of best coding practices, and (c) discuss and log issues that arise. We implemented pedagogical code inspections in three lab sessions of a CS 1 course. Through an analysis of inspection logs and exit surveys, we ...

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2009
• Where: SIGCSE
• Authors: Christopher D. Hundhausen, Anukrati Agrawal, Dana Fairbrother, Michael Trevisan
• Keywords: Education, Formal Code Inspection, Pedagogical Code Inspections, Pedagogical Code Review, SIGCSE 2009