research-article

Does Static Analysis Help Software Engineering Students?

Authors:

Reinhold Plösch,

Cornelia NeumüllerAuthors Info & Claims

ICEIT 2020: Proceedings of the 2020 9th International Conference on Educational and Information Technology

Pages 247 - 253

https://doi.org/10.1145/3383923.3383957

Published: 23 April 2020 Publication History

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Abstract

Research on the impact of static analysis tools on software quality is often targeted towards practitioners or open source projects in general. Research in the field of software education concentrates on the usefulness of static analysis in introductory courses to programming. Contrary, we want to find out, whether students doing their first larger programming project (projects of 3000 to 5000 LOC) can benefit from applying static analysis tools. We therefore prepared a SonarQube based quality profile with 448 coding best practices and set up an environment that helped us to analyze code submitted by the students throughout a semester. Students were asked to frequently have a look at the provided data (using the SonarQube dashboard) and to fix those violations of best practices where they thought it makes sense. There were no incentives or penalties for fixing or not fixing these violations of best practices. The case study shows that there are substantially different kinds of violations of best practices depending on the experience level of the student teams. Additionally, while high experience and moderate experience student teams learn quickly and substantially during a semester, students with low experience have difficulties in understanding the underlying problems of the reported violations of best practices.

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Nocera SFrancese RScanniello G(2023)Training Bachelor Students to Design Better Quality Web Apps: Preliminary Results from a Prospective Empirical InvestigationProceedings of the 27th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering10.1145/3593434.3593957(465-469)Online publication date: 14-Jun-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3593434.3593957

Index Terms

Does Static Analysis Help Software Engineering Students?
1. Applied computing
  1. Education
    1. Computer-assisted instruction
    2. Interactive learning environments
2. General and reference
  1. Document types
    1. Surveys and overviews

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ICEIT 2020: Proceedings of the 2020 9th International Conference on Educational and Information Technology

February 2020

268 pages

ISBN:9781450375085

DOI:10.1145/3383923

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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University of Thessaly: University of Thessaly, Volos, Greece

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Published: 23 April 2020

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ICEIT 2020: 2020 9th International Conference on Educational and Information Technology

February 11 - 13, 2020

Oxford, United Kingdom

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Nocera SFrancese RScanniello G(2023)Training Bachelor Students to Design Better Quality Web Apps: Preliminary Results from a Prospective Empirical InvestigationProceedings of the 27th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering10.1145/3593434.3593957(465-469)Online publication date: 14-Jun-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3593434.3593957

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An empirical study of PHP feature usage: a static analysis perspective

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