A Literature-Informed Model for Code Style Principles to Support Teachers of Text-Based Programming.

It is widely acknowledged that code style is an important aspect of text-based programming. This is because programs written with good style are considered easier to understand and change and so improve the maintainability of the delivered software product. However, it is difficult for educators to find appropriate guidance on teaching style concepts because the available advice is often conflicting or language-specific. In this paper, we describe an exploratory study to create a set of code style principles that can be used by educators to support their teaching. The abstract nature of the principles provides a means of reconciling the inconsistencies in style guidelines while forming a basis for presenting to students the key concepts for understanding and changing code. We extracted from four software product quality models the code attributes that relate to understanding and changing code and elicited feedback from colleagues to consolidate these into the principles. Principles relate to Language, Layout, Constructs, Design, Redundancy, Implementations, Repetition and Structure. To evaluate the principles, we mapped some common style guidelines to them. Our contribution is a set of high level principles that support the teaching of code style. In future work we will evaluate the principles within the wider community and in the classroom context.