Intro to Style Guides (Activity)

Title	The Need for Style Guides
Overview	In this activity students will learn about why we need a style guide for team-based projects and compare style guides for a various projects. Based on this experience, students will develop a style guide for their team.
Prerequisite Knowledge	Knowledge of basic regular expressions is helpful to understand the checkstyle documentation.
Learning Objectives	Upon completion of this activity, students will be able to: Explain how a style guide contributes to a team project. Develop a style guide for a project.

Background:

Working by themselves on small projects convinces students that coding style his little relevance. As they begin work on HFOSS projects, they need to begin to build an appreciation for the place of a standardized coding style.

This topic is an opportunity for active debate about coding style, but is also a lesson in the need for accepting standards - even if they are not your preference.

Directions:

The following activities should be completed by the student before coming to class:

• This article talks about the need for a coding standard
  • http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2012/10/25/why-coding-style-matters/
  • FIXME POGIL-like questions in response to the reading?
• In this video, Crockford uses JavaScript to illustrate key ideas about programming style
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EANG8ZZbRs
  • FIXME journal assignment responding?
• Read about the Google Style Guide
  • https://google-styleguide.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/javaguide.html
  • FIXME Question about reaction to the guide - agree, disagree, don't care.
• (optional) http://www.jrtwine.com/Articles/CodingStyles/CStyle1.htm (article about style versus standards)

Checkstyle (http://checkstyle.sourceforge.net/) is one of a number of static analysis tools that provides a measure of the health of a codebase. Read the ~150 items checked, and

(optional) Install checkstyle for your favorite IDE:

• http://checkstyle.sourceforge.net/index.html#Related_Tools

(optional) Add checkstyle to your build (ant, maven, etc.)

Deliverables:

What will the student hand in?

Assessment:

How will the activity be graded?

How will learning will be measured?

Include sample assessment questions/rubrics.

Comments:

What should the instructor know before using this activity?

What are some likely difficulties that an instructor may encounter using this activity?

Additional Information:

Knowledge Area/Knowledge Unit	What ACM Computing Curricula 2013 https://www.acm.org/education/CS2013-final-report.pdf knowledge area and units does this activity cover?
Topic	What specific topics are addressed? The Computing Curriucula 2013 provides a list of topics - https://www.acm.org/education/CS2013-final-report.pdf
Level of Difficulty	Is this activity easy, medium or challenging?
Estimated Time to Completion	How long should it take for the student to complete the activity?
Materials/Environment	What does the student need? Internet access, IRC client, Git Hub account, LINUX machine, etc.?
Author	Who wrote this activity?
Source	Is there another activity on which this activity is based? If so, please provide a link to the original resource.
License	Under which license is this material made available? (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/)

Suggestions for the Open Source Project:

Suggestions for an open source community member who is working in conjunction with the instructor.

---

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License