225,021 research outputs found
Scrum2Kanban: Integrating Kanban and Scrum in a University Software Engineering Capstone Course
Using university capstone courses to teach agile software development
methodologies has become commonplace, as agile methods have gained support in
professional software development. This usually means students are introduced
to and work with the currently most popular agile methodology: Scrum. However,
as the agile methods employed in the industry change and are adapted to
different contexts, university courses must follow suit. A prime example of
this is the Kanban method, which has recently gathered attention in the
industry. In this paper, we describe a capstone course design, which adds the
hands-on learning of the lean principles advocated by Kanban into a capstone
project run with Scrum. This both ensures that students are aware of recent
process frameworks and ideas as well as gain a more thorough overview of how
agile methods can be employed in practice. We describe the details of the
course and analyze the participating students' perceptions as well as our
observations. We analyze the development artifacts, created by students during
the course in respect to the two different development methodologies. We
further present a summary of the lessons learned as well as recommendations for
future similar courses. The survey conducted at the end of the course revealed
an overwhelmingly positive attitude of students towards the integration of
Kanban into the course
Quality-aware model-driven service engineering
Service engineering and service-oriented architecture as an integration and platform technology is a recent approach to software systems integration. Quality aspects
ranging from interoperability to maintainability to performance are of central importance for the integration of heterogeneous, distributed service-based systems. Architecture models can substantially influence quality attributes of the implemented software systems. Besides the benefits of explicit architectures on maintainability and reuse, architectural constraints such as styles, reference architectures and architectural patterns can influence observable software properties such as performance. Empirical performance evaluation is a process of measuring and evaluating the performance of implemented software. We present an approach for addressing the quality of services and service-based systems at the model-level in the context of model-driven service engineering. The focus on architecture-level models is a consequence of the black-box
character of services
Federated Embedded Systems â a review of the literature in related fields
This report is concerned with the vision of smart interconnected objects, a vision that has attracted much attention lately. In this paper, embedded, interconnected, open, and heterogeneous control systems are in focus, formally referred to as Federated Embedded Systems. To place FES into a context, a review of some related research directions is presented. This review includes such concepts as systems of systems, cyber-physical systems, ubiquitous
computing, internet of things, and multi-agent systems. Interestingly, the reviewed fields seem to overlap with each other in an increasing number of ways
Teaching Software Engineering through Robotics
This paper presents a newly-developed robotics programming course and reports
the initial results of software engineering education in robotics context.
Robotics programming, as a multidisciplinary course, puts equal emphasis on
software engineering and robotics. It teaches students proper software
engineering -- in particular, modularity and documentation -- by having them
implement four core robotics algorithms for an educational robot. To evaluate
the effect of software engineering education in robotics context, we analyze
pre- and post-class survey data and the four assignments our students completed
for the course. The analysis suggests that the students acquired an
understanding of software engineering techniques and principles
Lessons taught and learned from the operation of the solar energy e-learning laboratory
The solar energy e learning laboratory (solar e-lab) in Cyprus is a good example of a web-based, remote engineering laboratory. It comprises a pilot solar energy conversion plant which is equipped with all necessary instrumentation, data acquisition, and communication devices needed for remote access, control, data collection and processing.
The impact that the solar e-lab had during its nearly 5 years of operation is indeed high. Throughout this period, the solar e-lab has been accessed by users from over 500 locations from 79 countries spread all over the world. In the period of November 2004 to October 2008, more than a million visits were recorded, out of which 25000 have registered on the site and surfed through studying the supplied material. Around 1000 hits concerned registered users that passed the pre-lab test and performed the experimentation part.
The four years of operation of the solar e-lab demonstrated how the Internet can be used as a tool to make the laboratory facilities accessible to engineering students and technicians located outside the laboratory, including overseas. In this way, the solar energy e-learning lab, its equipment and experimental facilities were made available and shared by a number of interested people, thus widening educational experiences. Judging from the online evaluation reports that were received from the solar e-lab users during the last 2 years of operation, it can be concluded that there is nearly excellent satisfaction by the users
Beyond Surveys: Analyzing Software Development Artifacts to Assess Teaching Efforts
This Innovative Practice Full Paper presents an approach of using software
development artifacts to gauge student behavior and the effectiveness of
changes to curriculum design. There is an ongoing need to adapt university
courses to changing requirements and shifts in industry. As an educator it is
therefore vital to have access to methods, with which to ascertain the effects
of curriculum design changes. In this paper, we present our approach of
analyzing software repositories in order to gauge student behavior during
project work. We evaluate this approach in a case study of a university
undergraduate software development course teaching agile development
methodologies. Surveys revealed positive attitudes towards the course and the
change of employed development methodology from Scrum to Kanban. However,
surveys were not usable to ascertain the degree to which students had adapted
their workflows and whether they had done so in accordance with course goals.
Therefore, we analyzed students' software repository data, which represents
information that can be collected by educators to reveal insights into learning
successes and detailed student behavior. We analyze the software repositories
created during the last five courses, and evaluate differences in workflows
between Kanban and Scrum usage
Experimenting with Realism in Software Engineering Team Projects: An Experience Report
Over Several years, we observed that our students were sceptical of Software Engineering practices, because we did not convey the experience and demands of production quality software development. Assessment focused on features delivered, rather than imposing responsibility for longer term `technical debt'. Academics acting as 'uncertain' customers were rejected as malevolent and implausible. Student teams composed of novices lacked the benefits of leadership provided by more experienced engineers. To address these shortcomings, real customers were introduced, exposing students to real requirements uncertainty. Flipped classroom teaching was adopted, giving teams one day each week to work on their project in a redesigned laboratory. Software process and quality were emphasised in the course assessment, imposing technical debt. Finally, we introduced a leadership course for senior students, who acted as mentors to the project team students. This paper reports on the experience of these changes, from the perspective of different stakeholders
A comparative evaluation of dynamic visualisation tools
Despite their potential applications in software comprehension, it appears that dynamic visualisation tools are seldom used outside the research laboratory. This paper presents an empirical evaluation of five dynamic visualisation tools - AVID, Jinsight, jRMTool, Together ControlCenter diagrams and Together ControlCenter debugger. The tools were evaluated on a number of general software comprehension and specific reverse engineering tasks using the HotDraw objectoriented framework. The tasks considered typical comprehension issues, including identification of software structure and behaviour, design pattern extraction, extensibility potential, maintenance issues, functionality location, and runtime load. The results revealed that the level of abstraction employed by a tool affects its success in different tasks, and that tools were more successful in addressing specific reverse engineering tasks than general software comprehension activities. It was found that no one tool performs well in all tasks, and some tasks were beyond the capabilities of all five tools. This paper concludes with suggestions for improving the efficacy of such tools
Validation of Ultrahigh Dependability for Software-Based Systems
Modern society depends on computers for a number of critical tasks in which failure can have very high costs. As a consequence, high levels of dependability (reliability, safety, etc.) are required from such computers, including their software. Whenever a quantitative approach to risk is adopted, these requirements must be stated in quantitative terms, and a rigorous demonstration of their being attained is necessary. For software used in the most critical roles, such demonstrations are not usually supplied. The fact is that the dependability requirements often lie near the limit of the current state of the art, or beyond, in terms not only of the ability to satisfy them, but also, and more often, of the ability to demonstrate that they are satisfied in the individual operational products (validation). We discuss reasons why such demonstrations cannot usually be provided with the means available: reliability growth models, testing with stable reliability, structural dependability modelling, as well as more informal arguments based on good engineering practice. We state some rigorous arguments about the limits of what can be validated with each of such means. Combining evidence from these different sources would seem to raise the levels that can be validated; yet this improvement is not such as to solve the problem. It appears that engineering practice must take into account the fact that no solution exists, at present, for the validation of ultra-high dependability in systems relying on complex software
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