Work-In-Progress: Code Quality Issues of Computing Undergraduates
Oscar Karnalim, Simon, William Chivers · 2022 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON) · 2022
Several studies report code quality issues in academia by analysing student submissions. However, most of them focus on novices or a specific integrated development environment (IDE), and the findings might be less representative of code quality issues in general undergraduate computing. This study summarizes code quality issues from seven programming courses with various level of complexity. There are 931 assessment tasks with 15,323 Java/Python program files involved. The reported issues are specifically tailored to computing undergraduates and are selected with checkstyle (Java) and Flake8 (Python). Our study finds that students often neglect to use blank lines between code components, braces where they are optional, and a space after a comment marker. They also sometimes include too much code in one line. This initial study will be expanded via the development of a tool that can automatically summarize the code quality issues of each student submission.