The impact of automated code quality feedback in programming education

While some university-level programming courses focus on software quality, often in introductory courses code quality is little touched upon due to time constraints. Students usually get feedback on code quality after the grading of their assignment, feedback that cannot be used on that same assignment. Our aim is to improve students' skills for code quality during the evolution of a students' programming assignment, while keeping the overhead low for teaching staff as well as for students. Better Code Hub is a service that checks code quality according to ten guidelines. We employ Better Code Hub as a formative assessment and feedback tool enabling students to monitor their progress on code quality. Our findings indicate that there is an improvement in the code quality of the students' assignments over the period the tool is used. Our experiments show that students benefited the most from feedback on unit length, unit complexity, and code duplication.