Group colloquium: The Smell of Processing

When: March 8, 2018, 15:45-16:45

Where: RA 3336

Who: Ansgar Fehnker

Most novice programmers write code that contains design smells which indicates that they are not understanding and applying important design concepts. This is especially true for students in degrees where programming, and by extension software design, is only a small part of the curriculum.

This talk will discuss design smells in PROCESSING, a language for new media and visual arts derived from Java. Language features – as well as common practices in the PROCESSING community – lead to language-specific design smells. We extended PMD to detect these smells, and we applied the tool to student code, community code, and code examples used by textbooks and instructors. This analysis also gives a good sense of common design problems in PROCESSING, their prevalence in novice code, and the quality of resources that students use for reference.