Preliminary Studies on Use of Boa by Performing Programming Analysis on Student Projects

Abstract

Boa is a domain specific language which is used to mine software repositories. In this paper, we do a preliminary study to explore the use of Boa to provide feedback by performing programming analysis on software projects developed by undergraduate students at Iowa State university in the United States. These projects were developed for a course on software development practices where each team was encouraged to come up with their own idea and spend the semester realizing their idea and thus experiencing the different software development processes and their challenges. The large number of diverse projects make it difficult for the instructors to give individualized feedback on project quality to each team member. We wrote queries to answer specific heuristic questions like - finding if a project uses MVC design pattern, Rate of private over public method, Cyclomatic complexity, and Rate of Exception over method in the Boa language to identify code smells within a class and between different classes and run these queries on projects and report on our experiences here.