Poster: Continuous Inspection in the Classroom: Improving Students' Programming Quality with Social Coding Methods

Rich research has shown that both the teaching and learning of high-quality programming are challenging and deficient in most colleges' education systems. Recently, the continuous inspection paradigm has been widely used by developers on social coding sites (e.g., GitHub) as an important method to ensure the internal quality of massive code contributions. In this study, we designed a specific continuous inspection process for students' collaborative projects and conducted a controlled experiment with 48 students from the same course during two school years to evaluate how the process affects their programming quality. Our results show that continuous inspection can significantly reduce the density of code quality issues introduced in the code.