DevEventTracker: Tracking Development Events to Assess Incremental Development and Procrastination

Abstract

Good project management practices are hard to teach, and hard for novices to learn. Procrastination and bad project management practice occur frequently, and may interfere with successfully completing major programming projects in mid-level programming courses. Students often see these as abstract concepts that do not need to be actively applied in practice. Changing student behavior requires changing how this material is taught, and more importantly, changing how learning and practice are assessed. To provide proper assessment, we need to collect detailed data about how each student conducts their project development as they work on solutions. We present DevEventTracker, a system that continuously collects data from the Eclipse IDE as students program, giving us in-depth insight into students' programming habits. We report on data collected using DevEventTracker over the course of four programming projects involving 370 students in five sections of a Data Structures and Algorithms course over two semesters. These data support a new measure for how well students apply "incremental development" practices. We present a detailed description of the system, our methodology, and an initial evaluation of our ability to accurately assess incremental development on the part of the students. The goal is to help students improve their programming habits, with an emphasis on incremental development and time management.