Hyperstyle: A Tool for Assessing the Code Quality of Solutions to Programming Assignments
This tool addresses the need for automated code quality assessment in educational settings, particularly for MOOC platforms, but it is incremental as it builds upon existing linters.
The authors tackled the problem of assessing code quality in programming education by developing Hyperstyle, a tool that integrates existing linters to evaluate style and best practices across four languages, and it has processed about one million submissions weekly since integration into two platforms.
In software engineering, it is not enough to simply write code that only works as intended, even if it is free from vulnerabilities and bugs. Every programming language has a style guide and a set of best practices defined by its community, which help practitioners to build solutions that have a clear structure and therefore are easy to read and maintain. To introduce assessment of code quality into the educational process, we developed a tool called Hyperstyle. To make it reflect the needs of the programming community and at the same time be easily extendable, we built it upon several existing professional linters and code checkers. Hyperstyle supports four programming languages (Python, Java, Kotlin, and Javascript) and can be used as a standalone tool or integrated into a MOOC platform. We have integrated the tool into two educational platforms, Stepik and JetBrains Academy, and it has been used to process about one million submissions every week since May 2021.