Professors Leiserson and Amarasinghe teach a course called “Performance Engineering of Software Systems” at MIT. According to this article, they bring in experienced programmers from industry to do code reviews on students’ projects. Why didn’t I think of that?
Wow! I like it!
I had a class of about 15 students and in the last week I did 1-on-1 code reviews of everything they had done for the first 5 weeks. They found it very useful. I agree, but it was also a lot of work as each one took about an hour.
a cool idea would be use something like Atlassian’s Crucible and you could open up the code reviews to the world.
@aaron – the students I’ve had are usually nervous about anyone else seeing their code, because they know the quality isn’t that good. I don’t think they would be comfortable doing this.
“Opening up to the world” doesn’t means that anyone else will actually review the code. The teacher/coordinator is going to have to actively recruit people. Something like what you suggest would mean that reviewers don’t need to be present physically, but physical presence (if possible) is also a good thing.
In any case, the students I dealt with here had about 15 programs, and no experience with version control. They printed out the pages and I reviewed it. For the MIT course, with a much different background (my students were grad students in biology), it would of course likely work better.