Use of an agile bridge in the development of assistive technology

Engaging with end users in the development of assistive technologies remains one of the major challenges for researchers and developers in the field of accessibility and HCI. Developing usable software systems for people with complex disabilities is problematic, software developers are wary of using user-centred design, one of the main methods by which usability can be improved, due to concerns about how best to work with adults with complex disabilities, in particular Severe Speech and Physical Impairments (SSPI) and how to involve them in research. This paper reports on how the adoption of an adapted agile approach involving the incorporation of a user advocate on the research team helped in meeting this challenge in one software project and offers suggestions for how this could be used by other development teams

Simplifying Deep-Learning-Based Model for Code Search

To accelerate software development, developers frequently search and reuse existing code snippets from a large-scale codebase, e.g., GitHub. Over the years, researchers proposed many information retrieval (IR) based models for code search, which match keywords in query with code text. But they fail to connect the semantic gap between query and code. To conquer this challenge, Gu et al. proposed a deep-learning-based model named DeepCS. It jointly embeds method code and natural language description into a shared vector space, where methods related to a natural language query are retrieved according to their vector similarities. However, DeepCS' working process is complicated and time-consuming. To overcome this issue, we proposed a simplified model CodeMatcher that leverages the IR technique but maintains many features in DeepCS. Generally, CodeMatcher combines query keywords with the original order, performs a fuzzy search on name and body strings of methods, and returned the best-matched methods with the longer sequence of used keywords. We verified its effectiveness on a large-scale codebase with about 41k repositories. Experimental results showed the simplified model CodeMatcher outperforms DeepCS by 97% in terms of MRR (a widely used accuracy measure for code search), and it is over 66 times faster than DeepCS. Besides, comparing with the state-of-the-art IR-based model CodeHow, CodeMatcher also improves the MRR by 73%. We also observed that: fusing the advantages of IR-based and deep-learning-based models is promising because they compensate with each other by nature; improving the quality of method naming helps code search, since method name plays an important role in connecting query and code

Bridging the Gap

School districts across the country are increasingly seeking out digital tools to support the work of educators, in the hopes of improving students' academic achievement. With the rapid emergence of this new market, many districts have been challenged by the task of identifying and procuring educational technology (ed-tech) products that match the needs of their educators and students.The NYC Department of Education's "Innovate NYC Schools" division, supported by a U.S. DOE Investing in Innovation (i3) grant, aims to address this problem, in part by promoting "user-centered design," an approach that puts the needs and preferences of products' intended users (in this case, teachers, students, and parents) front and center in the development and procurement of new technology.Bridging the Gap describes the design and implementation of three Innovate NYC Schools initiatives grounded in user-centered design theory:School Choice Design Challenge (SCDC),an effort to develop apps that would help students explore and narrow down their choices of high school.#SharkTankEDU events, during which ed-tech developers present a product to a panel of educators who provide feedback on the tool.Short-Cycle Evaluation Challenges (SCEC), a classroom-based, semester-long pilot of ed-tech tools intended to inform product development, as well as the ultimate procurement decisions of school staff.The report focuses on four phases of work involved in bringing ed-tech companies and the users of their products together: defining a problem; selecting users and ed-tech companies; implementing pilot-based initiatives; and evaluating products. It describes strategies used and challenges faced, and offers practical lessons gleaned from the experiences of the individuals who designed and participated in these efforts.

Boundary Objects and their Use in Agile Systems Engineering

Agile methods are increasingly introduced in automotive companies in the attempt to become more efficient and flexible in the system development. The adoption of agile practices influences communication between stakeholders, but also makes companies rethink the management of artifacts and documentation like requirements, safety compliance documents, and architecture models. Practitioners aim to reduce irrelevant documentation, but face a lack of guidance to determine what artifacts are needed and how they should be managed. This paper presents artifacts, challenges, guidelines, and practices for the continuous management of systems engineering artifacts in automotive based on a theoretical and empirical understanding of the topic. In collaboration with 53 practitioners from six automotive companies, we conducted a design-science study involving interviews, a questionnaire, focus groups, and practical data analysis of a systems engineering tool. The guidelines suggest the distinction between artifacts that are shared among different actors in a company (boundary objects) and those that are used within a team (locally relevant artifacts). We propose an analysis approach to identify boundary objects and three practices to manage systems engineering artifacts in industry