In Support of Peer Code Review and Inspection in an Undergraduate Software Engineering Course

Peer code review and inspection is a quality improvementsoftware engineering activity consisting of systematicexamination of source code. While peer code review is commonlyused in industrial and open-source software projects, it is seldomtaught or practiced in undergraduate level Software Engineeringcourses. We conduct a study on the use of peer code reviewin a sophomore level introductory Software Engineering courseconsisting of more than 200 students and present our experiences,findings and challenges. We use Bitbucket's (a free code distributedversion control system hosting site for Git and Mercurial)in-built code-review system and web-based hosting service. Weextract the peer code review comments using Bitbucket API fordetecting coding standard or compliance violation and identificationof defects (number and type) by reviewers. We also conducta survey on the benefit of peer code review activity on peercohesion and communication. Our experiments and survey revealthat employing peer code review in an undergraduate class hasseveral learning benefits such as improvement in coding skills,program comprehension abilities, knowledge of coding standard,and compliance and peer communication