Using Verilog LOGISCOPE to analyze student programs

It is difficult to give an in-depth evaluation of student programs to the point of checking every line of code due to the amount of time checking would take. Solutions to this difficulty may involve only checking to see if the program executes correctly (dynamic analysis), glancing over the program to see if appropriate documentation is present (static analysis), and glancing over the code for any problems (static analysis). Automated solutions are difficult to construct. One commercial solution is Verilog LOGISCOPE which offers a limited number of licenses free to educators. LOGISCOPE is a static analysis checker capable of taking hundreds of individual measurements of a program, such as lines of code, McCabe´s cyclomatic complexity, and number of operators. It also shows the control flow graph of a program which is a depiction of the statements, if structures, and looping structures in a program. LOGISCOPE enables the complexity and quality of a program to be analyzed yielding valuable feedback to both students and educators. It allows visualization of the measurements taken through the control flow graphs and Kiveat diagrams. The operation of LOGISCOPE is shown by using typical student programs taken from the introductory computing course at Texas Tech University. Then the results of analyzing several programs from the same class are given to show the diversity of results. Finally, how LOGISCOPE can be used in education to help students improve their programming and help instructors evaluate programs better is considered.