Automated Program Analysis for Novice Programmers

This paper describes how to adapt a static code analyzer to help novice programmers realize their mistakes , as current analyzers give feedback which is not very useful for novice programmers. An extension to PMD was made so that feedback messages appear which are easier to understand for novice programmers. Firstly, the current limitations of PMD were looked at by looking at their feedback of common programming mistakes. Afterwards, these limitations were filled in by creating custom rules. Lastly, the effectiveness of these rules was measured by noting the difference of errors returned by PMD on a number of projects using the default ruleset of PMD, and one with an extended ruleset.