Beyond Surveys: Analyzing Software Development Artifacts to Assess Teaching Efforts

Many undergraduate IT programs recognize that their graduates will find jobs as software developers. As such, software development (analysis and design) courses are often a core requirement of IT undergraduate degree programs. This paper presents an analysis and comparison of the content of software development courses at several colleges and universities. In particular, the software development methodologies presented in the courses are examined. The comparison is based on two main criteria; the development methodologies presented through the textbook assigned to the class, and the development methodologies presented through the class lectures.A software development methodology is "a recommended collection of phases, procedures, rules, techniques, tools, documentation, management, and training used to develop a system" (Avison 2003). There are hundreds of software development methodologies. An ongoing debate has existed for several years as to what methodology is best. Prior research has shown that no methodology is best all the time and that practitioners are modifying methodologies to suit their needs. This research shows that IT software development courses have not been modified to reflect current trends in the practical application of development methodologies and students may not be learning the tools and techniques that they need to become successful practitioners. Key inadequacies and the associated pedagogical significance are discussed.

Understanding the processes in education, such as the student learning behavior within a specific course, is a key to continuous course improvement. In online learning systems, students’ learning can be tracked and examined based on data collected by the systems themselves. However, it is non-trivial to decide how to extract the desired students’ behavior from the limited data in traditional classroom courses. Software development courses are a domain where student behavior analysis would be especially useful, as continuous teaching improvement in this fast progressing domain is necessary. In this paper, we propose to use process mining for improvement-motivated process analysis of a software development course (web development in particular). To this end, we analyze Git logs of students’ projects to understand their development processes. Process mining has been chosen as it can help us to find a descriptive model of this process. The main contribution of this paper is the detailed methodology of process mining usage for students’ project development analysis, considering various commit characteristics, which are crucial in understanding student coding-behavior patterns. The process mining analysis proved to be very useful, indicating multiple directions for the course improvement, which we also include in this work as a secondary contribution. The third contribution of this work is the summary and discussion of the process mining advantages and current gaps in process mining research for this task. The data we used are made publicly available to other researchers.

It is often lamented that computer science graduates lack the skills needed to work on large, real-world projects. This paper describes an undergraduate course in software development recently offe...

This paper describes our experience integrating an authentic learning project into a junior-level software development course. During the course, students applied full software development life cycle processes to meet a campus need -- providing classroom clicker support without purchasing additional hardware. The paper provides the motivation for this approach, summarizes relevant developments in classroom response systems, details the design of the class project, and shares our results. Finally, we offer reflections describing both intended and unintended outcomes of this experiment.

Apart from source code, software infrastructures supporting agile and distributed software projects contain traces of developer activity that does not directly affect the product itself but is important for the development process. We propose a model that, by combining traditional contribution metrics with data mined from software repositories, can deliver accurate developer contribution measurements. The model creates clusters of similar projects to extract weights that are then applied to the actions a developer performed on project assets to extract a combined measurement of the developer's contribution. We are currently implementing the model in the context of a software quality monitoring system while we are also validating its components by means of questionnaires.

Students learn best when teachers get out of the way. Unfortunately, university classrooms continue to be intensely teacher-centric, are driven by the teacher’s agenda and calendar, and embrace simple models rather complex alternatives. These simple types of learning environments frustrate students’ development of the risk-taking and choice making confidence they need in the workplace. Bain (2004) makes the point that environments embracing choice as a priority, welcoming risk taking, and nurturing students who make mistakes, are better at preparing students for professional success. In this paper, we intend to provide context to the conversation about how learning-risks and agency impact and promote the individual growth of the student when the teacher gets out of the way.Combining a Rapid Assessment Process (RAP) (Beebe, 2001) informed by Action Research (AR) (Stringer, 2007; Schön, 1983; Argyris, 1993) we devised an experiment to determine if a university course would invite more student growth when the environment changed from being teacher-centric with highly structured assignments and critical assessments, to one that embraces the tenets of complexity theory. The purpose of this approach was an attempt to challenge the status quo; to show how complex interactions between risk-taking, agency, learning culture, teacher-facilitator-mentors, peers, coursework, and outcomes are important to students’ preparation for successful professional work. To accomplish this we experimented within a software development course at a large university in the northwestern United States and found students appeared more prepared to move on to the professional workplace when they had experienced risk taking and agency in a learning environment based on complexity theory precepts.

In this paper we describe our initiative to incorporate research, professional practice and methodologies into two undergraduate software engineering courses. As part of the Undergraduate Research Experience (URE) initiative on our campus, we modified two of our core software engineering courses. In our Software Development II (junior level) and Software Development Project (senior level) courses we integrated research projects, corporate visits and research talks to develop a deeper understanding of software engineering research and practice amongst our students.

Micro-practices are actual (and usually undocumented or incorrectly documented) activity patterns used by individuals or projects to accomplish basic software development tasks, such as writing code, testing, triaging bugs, or mentoring newcomers. The operational data in software repositories presents the tantalizing possibility to discover such fine-scale behaviors and use them to understand and improve software development. We propose a large-scale evidence-based approach to accomplish this by first creating a mirror of the projects in the open source universe. The next step would involve the inductive generalization from in-depth studies of specific projects from one side and the categorization of micro-practices in the entire universe from the other side.

Project-based learning (PBL) has gained traction in higher education as an effective pedagogical approach that promotes active learning, critical thinking, and the practical application of knowledge. Unlike traditional lecture-based methods, PBL engages students in collaborative projects that simulate real-world challenges, thereby enhancing their problem-solving skills. However, a notable gap exists in understanding how these theoretical benefits translate into actual student experiences. Therefore, this study aims to investigate undergraduate students’ perspectives and experiences in project-based learning. By understanding students’ perspectives and experiences, this research highlights the benefits, challenges, and overall effectiveness of PBL. A qualitative research design was employed, involving in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 30 undergraduate students. The students were exposed to project-based learning in research methodology and software development courses. The interviews were conducted in person and via video conferencing, ensuring a comfortable environment for participants to share their insights. The data collected from the interviews were transcribed verbatim and analyzed using thematic analysis to identify recurring themes and patterns. The thematic analysis revealed several key themes: the importance of consistent attendance due to the tailored and sequential nature of PBL; the facilitation of deeper understanding and the practical application of theoretical concepts; difficulties in adapting to PBL, especially when transitioning from traditional teaching methods; benefits and logistical challenges of collaboration; the crucial role of the iterative process of assessment and feedback in mastering concepts; and the fostering of autonomy and the development of essential skills such as time management and problem-solving.

Within a year of its launch, the University of Moratuwa's open learning platform (open.uom.lk) has over 180,000 registered participants, providing free and open access to a series of asynchronous online courses in software development. Nearly 17,000 people have completed the two foundation courses: Python for Beginners and Web Development for Beginners. Considering the low overall completion rate compared to the total number of registered users, it is important to study the factors contributing to successful completion while promoting meaningful learning. To support the learning process, there are multiple activities like lecture videos, lecture notes, coding playgrounds, lecture slides, assessments, and discussion forums. Thus, this study investigates student behaviour to understand activities that are high in cognitive load and promote active engagement. The study is carried out using learning management system (LMS) user logs and feedback from completed and ongoing students. The elaborative logs with user activities and time stamps help identify the pace of completion by students with different capabilities and learning patterns. The study's findings will be useful to educators because they will be able to design similar LMS platforms that optimise student performance and promote effective learning outcomes. Furthermore, it would be useful to evaluate how students would manage the load in asynchronous online learning programs. Understanding how the learning and assessment activities are related to the completion of the course would enable predicting completion rates and times to properly plan for the employment opportunities for the successful learners.

The growing enactment of Global Software Engineering in industry has triggered educational institutions to perceive the importance of preparing students for distributed software development. During the last twelve years we have disclosed advantages and pitfalls of GSE to our students through our Distributed Software Development course. After running the projects according to the iterative process model for eleven years, we decided to shift to an agile development model, SCRUM. This decision was due to the growing industrial adoption of agile methods, but more importantly to increase proactiveness, sense of responsibility, and to balance the workload among the project team members. In this paper we describe the process and outcomes of our first attempt at introducing SCRUM in our distributed course.

The increasing needs of information and communication technology affects the emerge of information and communication technology projects. One type of its project is software application development project, which this kind of project often totally or partially fails. Indonesia, as one of developing country requires various software types for their business environment in all aspects such as government, private sector or also personal use. The high use of information technology was not followed by awareness and financial ability to use proprietary technology, which is costly and monopolized by some certain vendor. The needs of uncostly and monopolized software was responsed by a software development community and some software vendor which later produced some softwares that are free to use and developed. These kind of softwares are called free and open source software (FOSS). Open source technology that emerged and boomed since few years lately still have various weakness and need to be accomodated by software developers and consumers. Differ from proprietary software, product support from vendor or community isn’t always available. This research’s aim is to identify, structuring and also analyze risk factors of open source-based software development.First stage of this research is to identify risk factors based on Carr et al, (1993) an approach named taxonomy-based risk identification. Combinined with risk identification by Peer, (2006) and FFIEC, (2004), it resulted new factor atribute. Second stage of research is risk assessment of identified risk factors. Most of risk assessment influenced by perception from expert, therefore, the assessment methods is needed to accomodated expert perception. This research used two perception-based methods, qualitative assessment by AS/NZS 4360, (1999) and Analytical Hierarchy Process proposed by Saaty, (1996). Both of this methods was assumed able to map expert’s perception and yield classification and priorities of risk factors.As a conclusion, risk factors identification by Carr et al, (1993) need to be enhanced by new atribute, which is the license options. This atribute becomes an important matter in course of software development because it can influence project succes and software legal attitude. AS/NZS 4360 Qualitative risk assessment classifies risk factors into three classification: extreme, high and moderate (while the low classification isn’t present). AHP risk assesment yields risk factors priority and classification by converting risk weight into four classification : extreme, high, moderate and low. Keywords : Risk Assessment, Taxonomy Software Development, Qualitative Analysis, Pairwise Comparison, analytical Hierarchy Process.

Serious games provide a method for teaching students in an engaging, non-threatening way. To be useful educational tools, these games need to be designed with the lesson objectives in mind. This paper uses the Game Design Matrix to design a game from learning objectives. The lesson objectives focus on software development, security and operations (DevSecOps). DevSecOps requires judging the cost and risk trade offs between secure and unsecured software aspects including code, data and usability; devising a strategy to produce a system under threat; comprehending that partial security may equate to no security; and identifying examples of insecure code and methods of mitigating it. These lesson objectives combined with the teaching environment drive design decisions that produce a game that fits well into a graduate level course in secure software design and development. We evaluate the game in a graduate course on secure software design and development. Learner surveys confirm that DevSecOps conveys the learning objectives in an engaging way.

Mobile computing is popular when wireless network has been deployed almost everywhere. Smartphones have been the important tools in our society for the abundant functions including communication, entertainment and online office etc as the pivotal devices of mobile computing. Smartphone software development has also become more important than before. Android is one of the emerging leading operating systems for smartphones as an open source system platform. Many smartphones have adopted this platform and more smartphones will do so in the future. It is also an emerging problem on how to develop software for smartphones based on Android and those platforms like it. We propose smartphone software development course design based on Android in this paper. What this course focuses is how to teach the development technology to Students. The course design has two parts including the syllabus design and hands-on lab design. At the same time, the innovations are also described in detail and these innovations play a key role in the teaching.

The emergence of software offshore outsourcing phenomena hits every country positively and one of the offshore client/vendor attractng factor is CMM certification. CMM is a well recognized and globally accepted standard in software development to process control, quality improvement, and measurement of software firm's capability. Therefore, Pakistani software firms (SMEs) are striving to achieve the CMM certifications to earn profit from offshore clients. In fact, CMM certification is not easy to adopt for all level of firms. Pakistan software industry is at its initial stage, so it is not recommendable to jump for CMM by software firms (SMEs) directly. The present research paper suggests that these software firms (SMEs) should go for adaptation of agile development methodology for excellent performance on the foot steps of CMM. In this way, software firms (SMEs) can leads toward CMM after agile maturity. The authors used the eXtreme Programming (XP) as an example that proves Agile Development Methodology can well fit the CMM framework and software development firms (SMEs) can achieve their objectives to participate in offshore outsourcing phenonmena.