The goal of the SAPA project is to develop a tool, which automates the supervision of many steps in the software development process. To provide feedback to students the results of this supervision process are aggregated and made available to tutors and students of these courses. This allows tutors to make dedicated suggestions for improvements to students and fosters a consistent evaluation of programs by different tutors of a course. To allow a widespread usage the tool will be independent of a particular course and institution and will support different programming languages. Furthermore, an extensive documentation including best practices will be developed.

The SAPA tool will be build with an existing versioning system as the backbone. To assess programs various software metrics will be integrated into the systems. When a student checks in a program the tool will calculate the metrics for this assignment and based on these results a report will be generated and made available to the submitter. The design of the tool provides the flexibility to assess programs in different programming languages using different metrics. The first languages to be supported are C and C++. The following range of metrics will be supported:

• Quality of software: unused variables, unchecked exceptions, etc.
• Handling of main memory: allocation and de-allocation, memory leaks
• Completeness: necessary files, documentation
• Naming conventions and coding style
• Length of functions, density of code, amount of comments
• Plagiarism detection

The tool offers a simple plug-in mechanism to introduce new metrics into the system. There will be a web-based front-end for students and tutors.