Teaching and improving code review in the classroom

Abstract

Code review in the classroom setting presents novel challenges compared to code review in the software engineering industry. In particular, students are not as experienced as professional software engineers. 6.031: Elements of Software Construction is an undergraduate computer science class at MIT that serves as an introduction to software engineering. In this class, Caesar, an online code review tool, is used for peer review of student code. Our work uses crowdworking research and principles to make Caesar even more suitable for the classroom setting. First, we provide more structure to writing code review comments. Next, we provide an interface for staff to evaluate the quality of student comments. Finally, we introduce practice tasks, which act as an initial training period at the beginning of every code review session. In this way, we give students more knowledge and structure to write high quality code review comments, and we provide an interface to evaluate that quality. We believe that our work allows students to have a richer learning experience through Caesar.