Intro to Style Guides (Activity)

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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.

Prerequisites

Knowledge of basic regular expressions is helpful to understand the checkstyle documentation.

Learning
Objectives
After successfully completing this activity, the learner should be able to:
  • Explain how a style guide contributes to a team project.
  • Develop a style guide for a project.
Process Skills
Practiced


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:

Ideas for in-class activities:

  • Have students work in their groups to compare their assessment of the checkstyle items. Each group should develop a single style for their work.

(optional) Install checkstyle for your favorite IDE:

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

Deliverables

Ideas for assignments:

Assessment

TBD

ACM BoK
Area & Unit(s)

SE - Software Engineering

ACM BoK
Topic(s)

SE/Software Process, SE/Tools and Environments,

Difficulty

medium (because of the time required)

Estimated Time
to Complete

2.5 hours preparing plus one class session

Environment /
Materials

Internet access, Java IDE

Author(s)

Ben Coleman

Source
License

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

CC license.png


Suggestions for the Open Source Project:

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

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