Code Comprehension Activities in Undergraduate Software Engineering Course - A Case Study

Abstract

In industry, inspections, reviews, and refactoring are considered as necessary software engineering activities for enhancing quality of code. In academia, such activities are rarely taught and practiced at Undergraduate level due to various reasons like limited skill set, limited knowledge of the available tools, time constraints, project setting, project client availability, flexibility with Syllabus, etc. However, we argue that such activities are an essential part of introductory software engineering courses and can result in improvement of coding skills, knowledge of coding standard and compliance to the same, and peer communication within teams. We have studied the use of such activities in a sophomore level Software Engineering course consisting of more than 200 students working in teams on projects from start-ups and present our experiences, findings and challenges. We present the results of quantitative evaluation of the impact of code comprehension activities before and after each iteration of the team projects.