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Measuring Students’ Source Code Quality in Software Development Projects Through Commit-Impact Analysis

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Information Technology and Systems (ICITS 2021)

Part of the book series: Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing ((AISC,volume 1331))

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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.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    https://www.agilealliance.org/glossary/scrum-of-scrums.

  2. 2.

    https://www.sonarqube.org/.

  3. 3.

    https://git-scm.com/docs/git-check-mailmap#mappingauthors.

  4. 4.

    Complete results available at https://tinyurl.com/yyurkzoo.

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Acknowledgments

This work was partially supported by the Universidad de Costa Rica project No. 834-B8-A27.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Universidad de Costa Rica, San Pedro, Costa Rica

    Sivana Hamer, Christian Quesada-López, Alexandra Martínez & Marcelo Jenkins

Authors
  1. Sivana Hamer
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  2. Christian Quesada-López
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  3. Alexandra Martínez
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  4. Marcelo Jenkins
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Sivana Hamer .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. ISEG, University of Lisboa, Lisboa, Portugal

    Álvaro Rocha

  2. Geografía, University of Santiago de Compostela, Santiago de Compostela, Spain

    Carlos Ferrás

  3. Ciencia Política y Sociología, Universidade de Santiago de Compostela, Santiago de Compostela, Spain

    Paulo Carlos López-López

  4. Santa Elena, Systems Dept, Univ Estatal Peninsula de, La Libertad, Ecuador

    Teresa Guarda

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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

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