Talking in Code: Code Review as a Form of Communication

Abstract

As coding and computation increasingly permeate statistics and data science courses, it is important for students to not only learn coding syntax, but also how to communicate their work. The process of code review enhances team communication by implementing a consistent feedback loop between coder and reviewer(s). While code review is commonplace in industry, it is not often implemented in data science classrooms. For this study, teams of undergraduate data science majors partnered with local community organizations to work on a data-focused problem. Students were given code review resources to utilize during the latter half of their projects. Data was collected through surveying students and interviewing their faculty advisors after project completion. This thesis presents results from these data to inform how students utilized the materials, their code review processes, and how they communicate via code review.