Automatic Assessment of Architectural Anti-patterns and Code Smells in Student Software Projects

Abstract

When teaching Programming and Software Engineering in Bachelor’s Degree programs, the emphasis on creating functional software projects often overshadows the focus on software quality, a trend consistent with ACM curricula recommendations. Dedicated Software Engineering courses take typically place in the later stages of the curriculum, and allocate only limited time to software quality, leaving educators with the difficult task of deciding which quality aspects to prioritize. To educate students on the importance of developing high-quality code, it is important to introduce these skills as part of the assessment criteria. To this end, we have implemented a pipeline based on advanced frameworks such as ArchUnit and SonarQube. It was successfully tested on a class of students engaged in the Object Oriented Programming course, demonstrating its usefulness as a resource for educators and providing some concrete evidence of quality problems in student projects.