Rookie Mistakes: Measuring Software Quality in Student Projects to Guide Educational Enhancement

TL;DR

This study evaluates software quality in intermediate student projects using static analysis, revealing common issues and offering guidance for educators to enhance Software Engineering curricula and promote quality practices.

Contribution

It extends prior research by analyzing larger, more complex student projects and providing actionable insights for teaching software quality in university courses.

Findings

Identified prevalent code smells and architectural anti-patterns in student projects

Highlighted specific quality issues faced by intermediate students

Provided evidence-based recommendations for curriculum improvement

Abstract

When teaching Programming and Software Engineering in Bachelor's Degree programs, the emphasis on creating functional software projects often overshadows the focus on software quality, a trend that aligns with ACM curricula recommendations. Software Engineering courses are typically introduced later in the curriculum, and can generally allocate only limited time to quality-related topics, leaving educators with the challenge of deciding which quality aspects to prioritize. In this decision, the literature offers limited guidance, as most existing studies focus on code written by novice students and small code units, making it unclear whether those findings extend to intermediate-level students with foundational object-oriented programming skills working on more complex software projects. To address this gap, we analyze 83 object-oriented team projects developed by 172 university students across 4 different editions of the Object-Oriented Programming course. We apply a static analysis pipeline used in prior research to assess software quality, combining SonarQube and ArchUnit to detect code smells and architectural anti-patterns. Our findings highlight recurring quality issues and offer concrete evidence of the challenges students face at this stage, providing valuable guidance for educators aiming to continuously improve Software Engineering curricula and promote quality-oriented development practices.