Code review in computer science courses: Take one

Abstract

Code review is an important tool regularly employed in information systems development practice. In this preliminary study we tested employment of code reviewing in educational setting in two Computer Science university-level courses: (a) in the first course we collected code reviews using an existing Learning Management System (LMS) that we regularly use to administer peer reviews; (b) in the other one we collected them using GitLab, an industrial strength source code management system. We compare results obtained from both experiments. Compared to our existing LMS, GitLab is readily equipped with more elaborate features for reviewing, commenting, and discussing code submitted by others, and the process is similar to industrial practice. However, as we also learned, the code reviewing workflow in GitLab is too open, which may be limiting in educational practice (e.g., the comments are immediately visible to everyone, hence it may happen that very active students leave little space for the remaining reviewers). This shows interesting directions for future research: one, to develop specific code-reviewing tool tailored to educational practice; but also to come up with novel methodologies which would enable to use real industrial tools while overcoming the issues pointed out in our study.