Towards Code Review Guideline in a Classroom

Software companies generally adopt code review to identify errors and suggest improvements to code, and share knowledge in the team. Companies assume a pre-knowledge on their engineers to undertake the activity. This could be difficult for freshly graduated students as in an academic environment code review is not often exercised: it is not an individual activity and requires substantial interaction among students, educators, deliverance, and acceptance of feedback, timely actions upon feedback as well as the ability to agree on a solution in the wake of diverse viewpoints. This paper proposes a guideline to code reviewing in a classroom. We report on the lessons learnt after applying the proposed guidelines to a large course in Computer Science. Students’ feedback suggests that the process has been well received with some points to be improved.