Grand Timely Topics in Software Engineering

Software Engineering (SE) is evolving to make the best out of the constantly changing technological trends, ranging from development to deployment to management and decommissioning of software systems. In this new column Trending Topics in Software Engineering, we aim at providing insights, reports, and outlooks on how researchers and practitioners around the world are working (or planning to work) on those trends. We intend to collect the challenges they are facing or foresee, and explore them in future issues. Our ultimate ambition is to stimulate fruitful discussion in our columns to contribute to identifying the next SE trends, while illustrating them to our audience.

The goals of computer science department and software engineering courses are not always clear as they could be, and exactly how much of a computer science curriculum should be spent on software engineering topics at the expense of topics with more immediate relevance to computer science majors is far from clear. Computer science students are sometimes skeptical about the relevance of software engineering course topics, particularly those who have had some experience in industry. They report that the techniques and procedures covered in standard software engineering texts are seldom used in industry. There is not enough communication between Industry and Academia, and graduates often must be re-trained for their new jobs. This is a proposal for a modification in the approach to software engineering education for computer science majors, and for clarification of the goals of computer science programs, and calls for procedures to increase the relevancy of computer science and software engineering courses to meet the needs of industry.

There is a critical need for timely and usable curriculum development materials for teaching user interface development to software engineering and computer science students. An updated version of the Software Engineering Institute's curriculum module on User Interface Development has been released. This paper provides an overview of the module, its history, and how it has been used.At the Software Engineering Institute (SEI) at Carnegie-Mellon University there is a Curriculum Development Project as part of the Education Program (Gibbs, 1989). A major goal of the curriculum development project is to devise model curricula and support-materials for teaching all topics in software engineering. For topics such as unit testing, software design, requirements analysis, and so on, there are curriculum modules to help teachers prepare courses. I have written, and recently revised, a module on User Interface Development (Perlman, 1989b), described in detail below. It has proven to be useful to all people interested in the teaching of user interface development to software engineers. Some of my experiences with the module are summarized in Perlman (1988).The module is not a book nor a course, but contains information to help others prepare short- or full-term courses on user interface development.

While many Software Engineering (SE) and Computer Science (CS) textbooks make use of case studies to introduce difference concepts and methods, the case studies introduced by these texts focus on a specific life-development phase or a particular topic within software engineering object-oriented design and implementation or requirements analysis and specification. Moreover, these case studies usually do not come with instructor guidelines on how to adopt the introduced material to the instructor’s teaching style or to the particular level of the class or students in the class. The DigitalHome Case Study aims at addressing these shortcomings by providing a comprehensive set of artifacts associated with the full software development life-cycle. The project provides an extensive set of case study modules with exercises for teaching different topics in software engineering and computer science, as well as guidance for instructors on how to use these case modules. In this chapter, the authors motivate the use of the case study approach in teaching SE and CS concepts. They provide a description of the DigitalHome case study and the associated artifacts and case modules. The authors also report on the use of the developed material.

In designing a new teaching system, a challenging issue is how the system intelligently supports learners. This paper describes a methodology and a system design on the intelligent instruction support for software engineering education. For information science courses at a university, software engineering subjects are usually compulsory and students study dominant conceptions of implementation like software architecture, and the methodology of software design in software engineering lectures. To enhance learners’ understanding, the authors design a novel instructional model based on the analogical thinking theory. The analogical thinking-based instruction consists of concrete teaching methods like analogy dropping method, self role-play method, and the anthropomorphic thinking method. Questionnaires for learners after the instructions give results of effective education in an actual trial. The contribution of this paper is to provide a new instruction theory, the way of educational practice method, and implementation of the system.

Embracing uncertainty in software development is one of the crucial research topics in software engineering. In most projects, we have to deal with uncertain concerns by using informal ways such as documents, mailing lists, or issue tracking systems. This task is tedious and error-prone. Especially, uncertainty in programming is one of the challenging issues to be tackled, because it is difficult to verify the correctness of a program when there are uncertain user requirements, unfixed design choices, and alternative algorithms. If uncertainty can be dealt with modularly, we can add or delete uncertain concerns to/from code whenever they arise or are fixed to certain concerns. This paper proposes a new programming and reasoning style based on Modularity for Uncertainty. The iArch-U IDE (Integrated Development Environment) is developed to support uncertainty-aware software development. The combined usage of a type checker and a model checker in iArch-U plays an important role in verifying whether or not some important properties are guaranteed even if uncertainty remains in a program. Our model checker is based on LTSA (Labelled Transition System Analyzer) and is implemented as an Eclipse plug-in. Agile methods embrace change to accept changeable user requirements. On the other hand, our approach embraces uncertainty to support exploratory software development.

A common approach for introducing computer science to middle school students is to teach them a simple yet engaging programming language A different approach is to teach them some advanced topic independent of any particular language or syntax We describe a 3-hour workshop module designed to do both This module has been piloted with a group of thirty 8th grade girls. It uses the Scratch programming language to develop the advanced software engineering concepts of specifications, refinement, and composition After this module, students were enthusiastic about continuing to program in Scratch independently and also felt they learned something about computer science as a discipline.

Guided by the eagerness to fulfill business objectives, quality assurance has become one of the highlighted topics in software engineering. With the rise of globalization and free markets, software users are becoming increasingly powerful with their ability to buy or reject computer software. While there is agreement over achieving quality, there is debate over the definition of quality. To illustrate, literature shows inconsistencies between a software development team definition to quality and a user definition to quality. Recently, there is a tendency amongst researchers to appreciate the need for studying quality from a user prospective. Following a systematic approach, this research attempts to develop a QiUPS, an expert system for predicting quality in use in early software development phases. With the scariness of research data in this field, the research generates a dataset from the documentation of Information, Communication, and E-learning Technology Centre software projects. The research methodology followed a comparative approach as it statistically compared four different classification algorithms (CAs) in terms of accuracy in classifying the research dataset. After that, the research results led the researchers to compare the performance of artificial neural networks with convolutional neural networks in three empirical experiments, which is rarely researched. Finally, the research incorporated the best CA with ISO 25010 in order to develop the novel QiUPS. The research results are consistent and contributive to this rarely researched area.

The continuous evolution of Software Engineering (SE) comes with a series of methodological and technical challenges to be faced, modelled and suitably tackled. Particularly, we observed that modern software systems are more and more deployed onto pervasive Cloud-IoT networks and composed of heterogeneous distributed components that interact to achieve a common business logic. Such phenomena naturally lead to the continuous development of newly trending topics worth exploring and discussing within our community, spanning the whole lifecycle of software applications (i.e. from design to development, testing, deployment, and management).

In the context of the European Higher Education Area adaptation process, a group of teachers of the Computer Science degree of the University of Cadiz have developed an initiative for the collaborative creation of a set of educational resources that are used or supplemented in diverse courses of software engineering and information systems core subjects. This initiative has been implemented as the proposal of a project, which has been accepted in the context of a call for higher education innovation projects for teachers and researchers and is developed along the academic year 2008/2009.

The emphasis on software engineering topics in the newest report on the second computer science class will have considerable impact on computer science education. Teaching issues arising from the incorporation of software engineering topics are discussed. Ideas for projects and group activities, together with approaches to encourage students to include ease of maintenance and user-friendly interfaces are provided.

Requirements elicitation, so directly related to the final success of a software project, is also a complex task. Requirement certification and validation need the customer and/or user's participation, for which reason software engineers must document the elicited requirements in a user-friendly format. The information, which clients find easier to understand, is gathered in a requirements catalog, usually written in natural language. This kind of requirements representation is often called customer oriented requirements or C-requirements. Usually, the teaching of the requirement-related topics is more concerned with requirement analysis, especially in modeling issues, than with the elicitation and C-requirements documentation process. This situation can produce misunderstandings and mistakes in students who try to carry out the requirements elicitation and documentation processes when they have to face a real or proposed software project. In this paper, we will describe a concrete requirements elicitation and documentation method that has been introduced to and accepted by students who take the software engineering subject as taught in the context of the computer science studies at the University of Salamanca (Spain).

Providing a concise and accessible overview of the design, implementation and management of medical software, this textbook will equip students with a solid understanding of critical considerations for both standalone medical software (software as a medical device/SaMD) and software that is integrated into hardware devices. It includes: practical discussion of key regulatory documents and industry standards, and how these translate into concrete considerations for medical software design; detailed coverage of the medical software lifecycle process ; accessible introduction to quality and risk management systems in the context of medical software; succinct coverage of essential topics in data science, machine learning, statistics, cybersecurity, software engineering and healthcare bring readers up-to-speed; six cautionary real-world case studies illustrate the dangers of improper or careless software processes. Accompanied by online resources for instructors, this is the ideal introduction for undergraduate students in biomedical engineering, electrical engineering and computer science, junior software engineers, and digital health entrepreneurs.

Providing a concise and accessible overview of the design, implementation and management of medical software, this textbook will equip students with a solid understanding of critical considerations for both standalone medical software (software as a medical device/SaMD) and software that is integrated into hardware devices. It includes: practical discussion of key regulatory documents and industry standards, and how these translate into concrete considerations for medical software design; detailed coverage of the medical software lifecycle process ; accessible introduction to quality and risk management systems in the context of medical software; succinct coverage of essential topics in data science, machine learning, statistics, cybersecurity, software engineering and healthcare bring readers up-to-speed; six cautionary real-world case studies illustrate the dangers of improper or careless software processes. Accompanied by online resources for instructors, this is the ideal introduction for undergraduate students in biomedical engineering, electrical engineering and computer science, junior software engineers, and digital health entrepreneurs.

Providing a concise and accessible overview of the design, implementation and management of medical software, this textbook will equip students with a solid understanding of critical considerations for both standalone medical software (software as a medical device/SaMD) and software that is integrated into hardware devices. It includes: practical discussion of key regulatory documents and industry standards, and how these translate into concrete considerations for medical software design; detailed coverage of the medical software lifecycle process ; accessible introduction to quality and risk management systems in the context of medical software; succinct coverage of essential topics in data science, machine learning, statistics, cybersecurity, software engineering and healthcare bring readers up-to-speed; six cautionary real-world case studies illustrate the dangers of improper or careless software processes. Accompanied by online resources for instructors, this is the ideal introduction for undergraduate students in biomedical engineering, electrical engineering and computer science, junior software engineers, and digital health entrepreneurs.