Abstract
Evaluating the quality of software engineering projects in university courses is challenging because it evolves over time and is a time consuming task. Students applying software quality principles need early and constant feedback on their projects to improve their technical competence as software developers. We conducted a case study to explore whether student’ changes have an impact on the project quality by mining a Git repository. We analyzed a total of 2253 changes (commits) from an undergraduate software engineering project to understand the impact on quality of each change measuring metrics (complexity, duplication, maintainability, and security) mined from the repository. This analysis allowed us to identify from students’ contributions challenges and improvement opportunities in engineering practices. As future work, we plan to analyze more projects and extend our analysis with more software metrics.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
- 2.
- 3.
- 4.
Complete results available at https://tinyurl.com/yyurkzoo.
References
Basili, V.R., Caldiera, G., Rombach, D.H.: The goal question metric approach. Encycl. Softw. Eng. 1 (1994)
Behnamghader, P., Alfayez, R., Srisopha, K., Boehm, B.: Towards better understanding of software quality evolution through commit-impact analysis. In: 2017 IEEE International Conference on Software Quality, Reliability and Security (QRS), pp. 251–262. IEEE (2017)
Boehm, B.W., Brown, J.R., Lipow, M.: Quantitative evaluation of software quality. In: Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Software Engineering, pp. 592–605. IEEE Computer Society Press (1976)
Chacon, S., Straub, B.: Pro Git. Apress (2014)
Garousi, V., Giray, G., Tuzun, E., Catal, C., Felderer, M.: Closing the gap between software engineering education and industrial needs. IEEE Software (2019)
Hamer, S., Quesada-López, C., Martínez, A., Jenkins, M.: Measuring students’ contributions in software development projects using git metrics. In: 2020 XLVI Latin American Computing Conference (CLEI). IEEE (2020)
Koetter, F., Kochanowski, M., Kintz, M., Kersjes, B., Bogicevic, I., Wagner, S.: Assessing software quality of agile student projects by data-mining software repositories. In: Proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Computer Supported Education-Volume 2: CSEDU, INSTICC, pp. 244–251. SciTePress (2019)
Louridas, P.: Static code analysis. IEEE Softw. 23(4), 58–61 (2006)
Mierle, K., Laven, K., Roweis, S., Wilson, G.: Mining student CVS repositories for performance indicators. ACM SIGSOFT Softw. Eng. Not. 30(4), 1–5 (2005)
Quesada-López, C., Martínez, A.: Implementation of project based learning: lessons learned. In: 2019 XLV Latin American Computing Conference (CLEI), pp. 1–10. IEEE (2019)
Robles, G., Gonzalez-Barahona, J.M.: Mining student repositories to gain learning analytics. In: 2013 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON), pp. 1249–1254. IEEE (2013)
Runeson, P., Höst, M.: Guidelines for conducting and reporting case study research in software engineering. Empirical Softw. Eng. 14(2), 131–164 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-008-9102-8
Acknowledgments
This work was partially supported by the Universidad de Costa Rica project No. 834-B8-A27.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2021 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Hamer, S., Quesada-López, C., Martínez, A., Jenkins, M. (2021). Measuring Students’ Source Code Quality in Software Development Projects Through Commit-Impact Analysis. In: Rocha, Á., Ferrás, C., López-López, P.C., Guarda, T. (eds) Information Technology and Systems. ICITS 2021. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 1331. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68418-1_11
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-68418-1_11
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-68417-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-68418-1
eBook Packages: Intelligent Technologies and RoboticsIntelligent Technologies and Robotics (R0)