Using Peer Review to Assess Coding Standards – A Case Study

This paper is based on a case study on using peer review for assessment. The peer review is a code review process (CRP), which was implemented in the second semester of 2005. It was found that the students with different cultural backgrounds had different opinions on how to learn coding standards. We particularly paid attention on providing a positive environment and opportunity to facilitate the communication among the students when we designed the CRP. The results suggest that not only did the students learned coding standards much more effectively, but also many more benefits beyond were achieved. This paper describes the background of the peer review, the rationale behind its use, and details of how it was implemented. The paper also analyzes and evaluates the practice from teaching and learning perspective. The data were collected by personal observation, informal interviews and a survey with rating scale questionnaires. The evaluation is based on the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats (SWOT) analysis.

1. A common practice to enforce coding standards in industry is to use the code review process, in which a team of developers sit down, check and make suggestions on the code produced by one or more members in the team according to formal style standards [1, 4, and 9]. (@li2006, 9)