Software Quality as a Subsidy for Teaching Programming

Abstract

Well-written code (which meets standards, conventions, and quality specifications) is often associated with the programmer's experience, which is why companies have been looking for increasingly qualified professionals. Codes at odds with these standards tend to be complex and poorly written and are generally difficult to understand. Consequently, the activities inherent to it become costly. Although well defined and consolidated in the industry, the concepts of code quality taught in the academy are insufficient to enable students to meet market expectations. Research indicates that graduates do not feel prepared to enter the labor market, facing difficulties when competing for the best job opportunities. This difficulty highlights a gap between industry and academia. Researchers have identified the gap and have proposed improvements to the teaching-learning process based on using the concepts and tools widely used in the software industry in an academic environment. When analyzing educational institutions' programming disciplines, it is possible to notice a mismatch between programming disciplines and code quality disciplines. In this scenario, this project aims to propose improvements on how knowledge of programming and quality is evolved, proposing an approach that uses software quality as a subsidy for teaching programming, providing the teacher with guidelines for teaching programming focusing on internal quality source code. We idealized an innovative practice that brought programming, usually focused on the execution of algorithms, within the teaching of code quality, focused on software engineering principles. The use of code inspection tools allowed direct teaching according to the class's needs, introducing a guided content-based internal quality teaching in programming disciplines without generating extra work for the teacher. In addition to the improvements for the teacher, we are convinced that from the student's perspective, we were able to motivate them to learn to program not only concerned with the execution results but also how the solution is developed.