• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
• /
• v.13 no.2
• /
• pp.19-31
• /
• 2013

Since the high readable source codes help us to understand and modify the program, it is much easy to maintain them. The readability of source code is not only affected by the complexity of algorithms such as control structures but also affected by the coding styles such as naming and indentation. Although various coding standards have been presented for promoting the readability of source codes, it has been usually lost or ignored in a programming course. One of the reasons is that the coding standard is not a hard-and-false rule since it does not contribute to the performance of software. In this paper, we propose a simple automatic system, namely StyleJigsaw, which checks the style of the source codes written by C/C++ or Java. In this system, the coding style score is calculated and visualized as a jigsaw puzzle. To measure the educational effectiveness of StyleJigsaw, several experiments have been conducted on a class students in C++ programming course. According to the experimental results, the coding style score increased about 8.0 points(10.9%) on average using StyleJigsaw. Further, according to a questionnaire survey targeting the students who attended the programming course, about 88.5% of the students responded that StyleJigsaw was of help to learn the coding standards. We expect that the StyleJigsaw can be effectively used to encourage the students to obey the coding standards, resulting in high readable programs.