Social code review tool for programming education

Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2011.This electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 63-65).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.by Mason Tang.M.Eng