Work in Progress: An Automated Management System for References in Programming Code

Abstract

Code reuse is a practice that may both support and hinder the learning process of programming students. To help offset the negative impacts of code reuse, many educators rely on code similarity detection tools as a first step in detecting code plagiarism. An alternative approach, often applied in parallel, is to help deter plagiarism by teaching students the importance of referencing externally sourced code. However, there are no broadly accepted standards for referencing in programming. We have found one standard proposed in the literature, and in this paper we explain the design of a system to help programmers apply that standard. The system we will build is a semi-automated code comment generation system that will rely on a code clone detection approach for detecting similarities between the student’s code and the code at a website whose URL the student provides. This will assist the user to create appropriate references, in the form of inline comments, when they reuse code from websites or other sources. This work in progress paper explores the relevant literature, explains the design choices of the system and the plan for its evaluation, and presents a progress report on the work.