Introductory programming: a systematic literature review

As computing becomes a mainstream discipline embedded in the school curriculum and acts as an enabler for an increasing range of academic disciplines in higher education, the literature on introductory programming is growing. Although there have been several reviews that focus on specific aspects of introductory programming, there has been no broad overview of the literature exploring recent trends across the breadth of introductory programming. This paper is the report of an ITiCSE working group that conducted a systematic review in order to gain an overview of the introductory programming literature. Partitioning the literature into papers addressing the student, teaching, the curriculum, and assessment, we explore trends, highlight advances in knowledge over the past 15 years, and indicate possible directions for future research

Teaching Introductory Programming to IS Students: The Impact of Teaching Approaches on Learning Performance

Introductory programming courses are typically required for undergraduate students majoring in Information Systems. Instructors use different approaches to teaching this course: some lecturing and assigning programming exercises, others only assigning programming exercises without lectures. This research compares the effects of these two teaching approaches on learning performance by collecting data from two sections of an introductory programming course in an urban public university. One section used lectures and assignments while the other used assignments only. Data analysis included tests within each dataset, tests across the two datasets, and tests of a simple model over the combined dataset. Results indicated that both approaches are effective, but the exercises-only approach is more effective than lectures combined with exercises. Further analysis indicated that students’ current programming skills, prior programming experience, and grade expectations are significant antecedents of learning performance in the course. Results support the conclusion suggesting that when teaching introductory programming courses, instructors may want to consider choosing the student-centered active learning over the traditional lecture format in order to improve students’ learning performance. This study contributes to the improvement of teaching and learning effectiveness as well as efficiency of introductory programming classes to the benefit of instructors and students, alike

Investigating Agile Adaptation for Project Development

Agile methodologies adaptation in software companies is an accepted norm.Rapid application development and efficient deliverables being the premise. The changing business needs, cost effectiveness and timely delivery are catered to by agile methods. Different software development models are in the literature and also are being used by the industry. Few companies have adopted agile, few are gearing up for and few are in transition. We investigated agile presence in a software company.Project management is an evolving art with innovative methods being added up.The aim of this paper is to tease about project management challenges, agile, agile transition in companies and a comparison of conventional software engineering practices with agile process model.This paper takes stock of the current status of quality in software projects and to add on quality process improvement strategies. The results presented here are after a qualitative interview study with one cross function team using streamline development framework in agile development

Motivational Social Visualizations for Personalized E-Learning

A large number of educational resources is now available on the Web to support both regular classroom learning and online learning. However, the abundance of available content produces at least two problems: how to help students find the most appropriate resources, and how to engage them into using these resources and benefiting from them. Personalized and social learning have been suggested as potential methods for addressing these problems. Our work presented in this paper attempts to combine the ideas of personalized and social learning. We introduce Progressor + , an innovative Web-based interface that helps students find the most relevant resources in a large collection of self-assessment questions and programming examples. We also present the results of a classroom study of the Progressor +  in an undergraduate class. The data revealed the motivational impact of the personalized social guidance provided by the system in the target context. The interface encouraged students to explore more educational resources and motivated them to do some work ahead of the course schedule. The increase in diversity of explored content resulted in improving students’ problem solving success. A deeper analysis of the social guidance mechanism revealed that it is based on the leading behavior of the strong students, who discovered the most relevant resources and created trails for weaker students to follow. The study results also demonstrate that students were more engaged with the system: they spent more time in working with self-assessment questions and annotated examples, attempted more questions, and achieved higher success rates in answering them

Structuring visual exploratory analysis of skill demand

The analysis of increasingly large and diverse data for meaningful interpretation and question answering is handicapped by human cognitive limitations. Consequently, semi-automatic abstraction of complex data within structured information spaces becomes increasingly important, if its knowledge content is to support intuitive, exploratory discovery. Exploration of skill demand is an area where regularly updated, multi-dimensional data may be exploited to assess capability within the workforce to manage the demands of the modern, technology- and data-driven economy. The knowledge derived may be employed by skilled practitioners in defining career pathways, to identify where, when and how to update their skillsets in line with advancing technology and changing work demands. This same knowledge may also be used to identify the combination of skills essential in recruiting for new roles. To address the challenges inherent in exploring the complex, heterogeneous, dynamic data that feeds into such applications, we investigate the use of an ontology to guide structuring of the information space, to allow individuals and institutions to interactively explore and interpret the dynamic skill demand landscape for their specific needs. As a test case we consider the relatively new and highly dynamic field of Data Science, where insightful, exploratory data analysis and knowledge discovery are critical. We employ context-driven and task-centred scenarios to explore our research questions and guide iterative design, development and formative evaluation of our ontology-driven, visual exploratory discovery and analysis approach, to measure where it adds value to users’ analytical activity. Our findings reinforce the potential in our approach, and point us to future paths to build on

Report from GI-Dagstuhl Seminar 16394: Software Performance Engineering in the DevOps World

This report documents the program and the outcomes of GI-Dagstuhl Seminar 16394 "Software Performance Engineering in the DevOps World". The seminar addressed the problem of performance-aware DevOps. Both, DevOps and performance engineering have been growing trends over the past one to two years, in no small part due to the rise in importance of identifying performance anomalies in the operations (Ops) of cloud and big data systems and feeding these back to the development (Dev). However, so far, the research community has treated software engineering, performance engineering, and cloud computing mostly as individual research areas. We aimed to identify cross-community collaboration, and to set the path for long-lasting collaborations towards performance-aware DevOps. The main goal of the seminar was to bring together young researchers (PhD students in a later stage of their PhD, as well as PostDocs or Junior Professors) in the areas of (i) software engineering, (ii) performance engineering, and (iii) cloud computing and big data to present their current research projects, to exchange experience and expertise, to discuss research challenges, and to develop ideas for future collaborations

Control, Process Facilitation, and Requirements Change in Offshore Requirements Analysis: The Provider Perspective

Process, technology, and project factors have been increasingly driving organizations to offshore early software development phases, such as requirements analysis. This emerging trend necessitates greater control and process facilitation between client and vendor sites. The effectiveness of control and facilitation has, however, not been examined within the context of requirements analysis and change. In this study, we examine the role of control and facilitation in managing changing requirements and on success of requirements gathering in the Indian offshore software development environment. Firms found that control by client-site coordinators had a positive impact on requirements analysis success while vender site-coordinators did not have similar influence. Process facilitation by client site-coordinators affected requirements phase success indirectly through control. The study concludes with recommendations for research and practice