Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Fixing Your Own Smells: Adding A Mistake-Based Familiarization Step When Teaching Code Refactoring, Ivan Wei Han Tan, Christopher M. Poskitt

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

Programming problems can be solved in a multitude of functionally correct ways, but the quality of these solutions (e.g. readability, maintainability) can vary immensely. When code quality is poor, symptoms emerge in the form of 'code smells', which are specific negative characteristics (e.g. duplicate code) that can be resolved by applying refactoring patterns. Many undergraduate computing curricula train students on this software engineering practice, often doing so via exercises on unfamiliar instructor-provided code. Our observation, however, is that this makes it harder for novices to internalise refactoring as part of their own development practices. In this paper, we propose a …