Toward Code Review Notebooks

Peer code review has proven to be a valuable tool in software engineering. However, integrating code reviews into educational contexts is particularly challenging due to the complexity of both the process and popular code review tools. We propose to address this challenge by designing a code review application (CRA) aimed at teaching the code review process directly within existing online learning platforms. Using the CRA, instructors can scaffold online lessons that introduce the code review process to students through code snippets, following a format resembling computational notebooks. We refer to this online lesson format as the code review notebook format. Through a case study comprising an online lesson on code quality standards completed by 23 university students, we evaluated the usability of the CRA and the code review notebook format, obtaining positive results for both. These results are a first step toward integrating code review notebooks into software engineering education.