Code Quality Issues in Student Programs
Hieke Keuning, Bastiaan Heeren, and Johan Jeuring
Because low quality code can cause serious problems in software
systems, students learning to program should pay attention to code
quality early. Although many studies have investigated mistakes
that students make during programming, we do not know much
about the quality of their code. This study examines the presence
of quality issues related to program flow, choice of programming
constructs and functions, clarity of expressions, decomposition
and modularization in a large set of student Java programs. We
investigated which issues occur most frequently, if students are
able to solve these issues over time and if the use of code analysis
tools has an effect on issue occurrence. We found that students
hardly fix issues, in particular issues related to modularization, and
that the use of tooling does not have much effect on the occurrence
of issues.
In Proceedings of ITiCSE'17, pages 110-115, 2017.