Code-Review-as-an-Educational-Service: A tool for Java code review in programming education

Abstract

High-quality source code is the foundation of successful and sustainable software development, while code review plays a crucial role in ensuring code quality. We place a special emphasis on the educational application of code review, aiming to assist novice students who are entry-level programmers establish industry-standard programming practices while reducing the likelihood of vulnerabilities and technical debt. Given that existing code review tools often require complex setups and are designed for large-scale, enterprise-level software projects, we advocate for the development of an easy-to-use, zero-configuration, and lightweight tool that is specifically tailored to the needs of educational environments. This paper reports our development of such a cloud-native code review tool as an educational service. Although still at the proof-of-concept stage, our internal and preliminary assessment has confirmed the promising usability and usefulness of this tool both for students (e.g., self-reviewing an individual exercise) and for educators (e.g., examining cohort exercises and prioritising teaching materials). By integrating this tool into our innovative project Automating Programming Education in Java, we believe that such an educational service would be able to make contributions to faster maturation of programming skills in students.