Caesar : a social code review tool for programming education

Caesar is a distributed, social code review tool designed for the specific constraints and goals of a programming course. Caesar is capable of scaling to a large and diverse reviewer population, provides automated tools for increasing reviewer efficiency, and implements a social web interface for reviewing that encourages discussion and participation. Our system is implemented in three loosely-coupled components: a language-specific code preprocessor that partitions code into small pieces, filters out uninteresting ones, runs static analysis, and detects clusters of similar code; an incremental task router that dynamically assigns reviewers to tasks; and a language-agnostic web interface for reviewing code. Our evaluation using actual student code and a user study indicate that Caesar provides a significant improvement over existing code review workflows and interfaces. We also believe that this work contributes a modular framework for code reviewing systems that can be easily extended and improved.

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2011

Author dc:creator

• Tang, Mason

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Robert C. Miller.

• Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Statement dc:rights

• M.I.T. theses are protected by copyright. They may be viewed from this source for any purpose, but reproduction or distribution in any format is prohibited without written permission. See provided URL for inquiries about permission.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/77504

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/77504