104,240 research outputs found
On the Presence of Green and Sustainable Software Engineering in Higher Education Curricula
Nowadays, software is pervasive in our everyday lives. Its sustainability and
environmental impact have become major factors to be considered in the
development of software systems. Millennials-the newer generation of university
students-are particularly keen to learn about and contribute to a more
sustainable and green society. The need for training on green and sustainable
topics in software engineering has been reflected in a number of recent
studies. The goal of this paper is to get a first understanding of what is the
current state of teaching sustainability in the software engineering community,
what are the motivations behind the current state of teaching, and what can be
done to improve it. To this end, we report the findings from a targeted survey
of 33 academics on the presence of green and sustainable software engineering
in higher education. The major findings from the collected data suggest that
sustainability is under-represented in the curricula, while the current focus
of teaching is on energy efficiency delivered through a fact-based approach.
The reasons vary from lack of awareness, teaching material and suitable
technologies, to the high effort required to teach sustainability. Finally, we
provide recommendations for educators willing to teach sustainability in
software engineering that can help to suit millennial students needs.Comment: The paper will be presented at the 1st International Workshop on
Software Engineering Curricula for Millennials (SECM2017
Role clarity deficiencies can wreck agile teams
Background
One of the twelve agile principles is to build projects around motivated individuals and trust them to get the job done. Such agile teams must self-organize, but this involves conflict, making self-organization difficult. One area of difficulty is agreeing on everybody’s role.
Background
What dynamics arise in a self-organizing team from the negotiation of everybody’s role?
Method
We conceptualize observations from five agile teams (work observations, interviews) by Charmazian Grounded Theory Methodology.
Results
We define role as something transient and implicit, not fixed and named. The roles are characterized by the responsibilities and expectations of each team member. Every team member must understand and accept their own roles (Local role clarity) and everbody else’s roles (Team-wide role clarity). Role clarity allows a team to work smoothly and effectively and to develop its members’ skills fast. Lack of role clarity creates friction that not only hampers the day-to-day work, but also appears to lead to high employee turnover. Agile coaches are critical to create and maintain role clarity.
Conclusions
Agile teams should pay close attention to the levels of Local role clarity of each member and Team-wide role clarity overall, because role clarity deficits are highly detrimental
A Review on Software Architectures for Heterogeneous Platforms
The increasing demands for computing performance have been a reality
regardless of the requirements for smaller and more energy efficient devices.
Throughout the years, the strategy adopted by industry was to increase the
robustness of a single processor by increasing its clock frequency and mounting
more transistors so more calculations could be executed. However, it is known
that the physical limits of such processors are being reached, and one way to
fulfill such increasing computing demands has been to adopt a strategy based on
heterogeneous computing, i.e., using a heterogeneous platform containing more
than one type of processor. This way, different types of tasks can be executed
by processors that are specialized in them. Heterogeneous computing, however,
poses a number of challenges to software engineering, especially in the
architecture and deployment phases. In this paper, we conduct an empirical
study that aims at discovering the state-of-the-art in software architecture
for heterogeneous computing, with focus on deployment. We conduct a systematic
mapping study that retrieved 28 studies, which were critically assessed to
obtain an overview of the research field. We identified gaps and trends that
can be used by both researchers and practitioners as guides to further
investigate the topic
Communication: key factor in multidisciplinary system design
System design research often looks at ways to model the system that is developing. Many modelling techniques and model representations exist. Another aspect these models can be used for is to enable, facilitate and improve communication among the developers during the process. The young System Design Group at the faculty of Engineering Technology of the University of Twente, the Netherlands, aims at focusing on this communication aspect in system design.\ud
In the paper, a few finished and running projects undertaken in close cooperation with industry are described concisely. From these projects three research themes are derived. These are: creation of high-level models, combining model representations and condense information. The paper ends with plans for future research
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