Software engineer education support system ALECSS utilizing DevOps tools

Various types of DevOps tools are widely used for software development in order to ensure software quality and quick delivery of the software. Typical examples of such DevOps tools are continuous integration tool Jenkins, version control tool Git, unit test tool JUnit, coding style checker Checkstyle and static code analysis tool FindBugs. In this paper, we propose an education support system ALECSS to train software developers by integrating several DevOps tools explained above. The system automatically checks the programs submitted by the student teams and provides feedbacks generated by the DevOps tools to the students. The feedbacks are valuable to learn various techniques for high quality software development and to support evaluation by the teacher. We also develop various scripts for output checking and Git working status checking. These scripts use exercise contents and student's information in checking and sometimes need to generate typical results from templates for comparing them with the students' answers. Such scripts are also integrated to ALECSS. We evaluate ALECSS by comparing the messages generated by Checkstyle and FindBugs with the review comments produced the student teams. We found that the automatically generated messages and the review comments are greatly differ so that both are important for effective education.