Text writing and clean code production: two realities of the same process in engineering students

Abstract

The quality of software products depends to a large extent on the ability of developers to generate clean code since they allow increasing the software life cycle. Therefore, it is crucial to improve the pedagogical practices of teaching programming, in particular, the ability of students to write quality code. However, the literature does not recognize comprehensive pedagogical models that guide the development of this writing ability, as observed in text redaction. This paper relates the production of clean code with the conceptions of the writing process in Computer Engineering students. Thereby, we used three practical assessments to evaluate the process of clean code programming on university students to later relate the results with the perceptions about writing that this group has. Results show a relationship between performance in programming tasks and the cohort and a positive correlation between the production of clean code and conceptions about writing. We conclude that our study opens a transdisciplinary collaboration. It can advance towards a pedagogical model to guide the teaching of clean code writing that contributes to higher quality software products.

Keywords:
Computer programming; Written language; Engineering education