Assessing Understanding of Maintainability using Code Review

Abstract

Maintainability is an important quality attribute of code, and so should be a key learning outcome for software engineering programmes. This raises the question of how to assess this learning outcome. In this practical report we describe how we exploited the code review mechanism provided by GitHub, the “pull request”, to assess students’ understanding of maintainability. It requires a slightly non-standard workflow by the students and a reporting tool to assemble the code review comments in a form suitable for assessment. We give the details of what we learned to make it work that should allow others to conduct similar kinds of assessment.