Introducing SCRUM into a Distributed Software Development Course

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.

This paper describes the goals, design and initial challenges encountered in teaching a globally distributed software development course in collaboration between the University of Victoria, Canada and Aalto University, Finland. The project-driven collaboration course involved 16 students in Canada and nine students in Finland, divided into three globally distributed Scrum teams working on the same project. The teams worked on extending Agilefant, an open-source backlog management system, in direct interaction with its product owner. The collaborative development is based on the Scrum methodology. We describe how the Scrum methodology was implemented, and adapted to work in a distributed environment, as well as the infrastructure used to support collaboration, e.g. local war-rooms, and multiple communication tools. We conclude the paper with describing initial challenges encountered, including cultural, semester, course and curriculum differences, as well as technical and time-zone issues.

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...

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.

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.

Software needs to be secure, in particular, when deployed to critical infrastructures. Secure coding guidelines capture practices in industrial software engineering to ensure the security of code. This study aims to assess the level of awareness of secure coding in industrial software engineering, the skills of software developers to spot weaknesses in software code, avoid them, and the organizational support to adhere to coding guidelines. The approach draws on well-established theories of policy compliance, neutralization theory, and security-related stress and the authors' many years of experience in industrial software engineering and on lessons identified from training secure coding in the industry. The paper presents the questionnaire design for the online survey and the first analysis of data from the pilot study.

There is a long-standing challenge to narrow the gap between software engineering research and industry practice, to align their interests and realize true synergies between the two communities. Some difficulties to this challenge include mismatched agendas, priorities and expectations from the research collaboration on both sides. To overcome these difficulties, an initial step is to gain a clearer understanding of collaboration challenges from both perspectives. With this goal in mind, we organized the 5th International Workshop on Software Engineering Research and Industrial Practice, collocated with the International Conference on Software Engineering 2018. The workshop featured two keynote talks, one from industry and one from academia, followed by paper presentations and a round-table discussion session. Here we summarize experiences shared by the keynotes from industry and academia, along with findings from paper presentations and overall discussions by workshop participants on the ways of aligning software engineering research and industry practice.

Modern softwares are very large and complex. As the size and complexity of software increases, software developers feel an urgent need for a better management of different activities during the course of software development. In this paper, we present an approach of use case scenario prioritization suitable for project planning at an early phase of the software development. We consider only use case model in our work. For prioritization, we focus on how critical a scenario path is, which essentially depends on density of overlapping of sub path of a scenario path with other scenario path(s) of a use case. Our proposed approach provides an analytical solution on use case scenario prioritization and is very much effective in project management related activities as substantiated by our experimental results.

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.

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 need for awareness on ethical computing is increasingly becoming important. As a result this challenges all stakeholders in the software engineering profession, including educators, to improve their efforts on the awareness of professional codes of ethics which provide framework for ethical reference. However, the several compromises in the software engineering practice suggest that there are some in the profession, who are not familiar with the profession’s codes of ethics and subsequently not able to practice and teach students about them. This research work investigates the extent of codes of ethics awareness by practitioners who are teaching software development courses in an academic environment. An online questionnaire with indicators for measuring awareness on software engineering code of ethics was deployed and responded to by 44 educators. Graphical, univariate and bivariate analyses were conducted on the data to determine the profile of the respondents and the extent of their level of awareness on the codes of ethics. The results indicate that majority of the lecturers (54.5 %) are not aware of software engineering codes of ethics, and those who are aware, majority of them were exposed to through self-study or personal development. Furthermore, the inclusion of codes of ethics in the learning activities is minimal as inhibited by lack of awareness and failure to apply the codes practically. This study recommends that lecturing staff as part of the professional software engineers serving as academic corps, should be placed on programmes for exposing them to professional software engineering codes of ethics. Moreover, the study calls for accreditation of software engineering courses, as it is the case with other professional engineering disciplines, to improve awareness and subsequent practical application of the codes of ethics.

Teaching group based Agile software development project courses is difficult. There are many aspects that need to be considered for a project to be successful such as a well defined scope, students working effectively together, and engaging with the customer. In this paper we present an experience report at teaching an Agile software development project course that involved teams developing web applications. The resources developed for the course and discussion about our experience will help inform others who also wish to teach group based software development courses.

The goal of this paper is to examine the overall structure of different response patterns of global software learning teams and understand how these response activities are affected by different types of leadership arrangements (i.e., emergent versus assigned leaders). Results from a two-semester study with 24 teams enrolled in global software development courses at Universities in Turkey, Panama, and the US reveal that the presence of different team leadership arrangements resulted in differences in the communication response patterns among group members. Assigned leader groups tended to show more distributed communication response patterns than those teams with Emergent leaders. Moreover, the communication responses within Assigned leader groups tended to be more directed toward non-leaders than those that occurred within Emergent leader groups. Finally, results of this study indicate that Assigned leader groups tend to develop a very different structure of communication than that which occurs in Emergent leader groups.

Human Computer Systems (HCS) consist of machinery, software and people. However, all too many introductory software development courses concentrate unduly on the nature of programming and ignore the needs of the user. In this paper we will implicitly critique most existing introductory software development units, from an analysis of their supporting texts. We will suggest a checklist that could be applied to a unit or to a text to ensure that they include usability considerations. We will also critique many existing HCI units and courses that do not pay adequate attention to integrative exercises. We will conclude by suggesting ways in which these problems can start to be solved.