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

Academic Integrity Resources - links and guides

an online tutorial, a pdf version, a powerpoint presentation, links to regulations

SCOF: A Standardised, Customisable Online Feedback Tool

Increasing pressures on staff, combined with increased requests for feedback from students mean that there is less time to do more things. Investigation into potential methods to assist the staff of the School of Engineering and Mathematical Sciences at City University London in their feedback activities identified that a combination of bespoke feedback combined with a standardised scheme (or rubric) may give the best results. The stand-alone SCOF tool was developed to address this observation and allows staff to create formatted feedback sheets quickly in different environments, using tools ranging from desktop computers to mobile telephones and tablets. It is currently about to undergo an institution-wide evaluation and will subsequently be made freely available to other institutions. This paper outlines the requirements of the tool, its usage, evaluation progress and future work to be undertaken, and includes a link to a public demonstration version of the tool

SSP: a simple software process for small- size software development projects

A large number of software development projects in Latin- American countries are small-size, poorly defined and time pressured. These projects usually involve under qualified people. Provided that well-known software development models have shown limited applicability in such scenario, developers usually carry out ad-hoc software processes. Therefore, the obtained results are unpredictable. This article presents a Simple Software Process (SSP) for small-size software projects involving under qualified people. The proposal is motivated by current practice in Chile. SSP proposes a step-by-step process which structures the development activities and it improves the process visibility for clients and team members. Furthermore, SSP formally includes “the user/client” as an active role to be played during the project. This process has been used in 22 software projects and the results are encouraging.1st International Workshop on Advanced Software Engineering: Expanding the Frontiers of Software Technology - Session 3: Software Development ProcessRed de Universidades con Carreras en Informática (RedUNCI

Scoping the future: a model for integrating learning environments

The Virtual Learning Environment (VLE) has become synonymous with online learning in HE.However, with the rise of Web 2.0 technologies, social networking tools and cloud computing thearchitecture of the current VLEs is increasingly anachronistic. This paper suggests an alternative tothe traditional VLE: one which allows for flexibility and adaptation to the needs of individual teachers,while remaining resilient and providing students with a seamless experience. We present a prototypeof our vision, combining our new development software and a number of existing tried and tested toolsinto a single flexible interface, and built on established pedagogical and technical standards

A tool for metadata analysis

We describe a Web-based metadata quality tool that provides statistical descriptions and visualisations of Dublin Core metadata harvested via the OAI protocol. The lightweight nature of development allows it to be used to gather contextualized requirements and some initial user feedback is discussed

On Integrating Student Empirical Software Engineering Studies with Research and Teaching Goals

Background: Many empirical software engineering studies use students as subjects and are conducted as part of university courses. Aim: We aim at reporting our experiences with using guidelines for integrating empirical studies with our research and teaching goals. Method: We document our experience from conducting three studies with graduate students in two software architecture courses. Results: Our results show some problems that we faced when following the guidelines and deviations we made from the original guidelines. Conclusions: Based on our results we propose recommendations for empirical software engineering studies that are integrated in university courses.