Refactor4Green: A Game for Novice Programmers to Learn Code Smells

Abstract

The rise in awareness of sustainable software has led to a focus on energy efficiency and consideration of code smells during soft-ware development. This eventually requires software engineering teachers to focus on topics such as code smells in their software engineering courses to bring awareness among students on the impact of code smells and bad design choices, not just for the soft-ware but also for the environment. Thus, we propose a desktop game named Refactor4Green to teach code smells and refactoring to novice programmers. The core idea of the game is to introduce code smells with refactoring choices through the theme of a green environment. We conducted a preliminary study with university students and got positive feedback from 83.06% of the participants.