Uncovering source code reuse in large-scale academic environments

The advent of the Internet has caused an increase in content reuse, including source code. The purpose of this research is to uncover potential cases of source code reuse in large-scale environments. A good example is academia, where massive courses are taught to students who must demonstrate that they have acquired the knowledge. The need of detecting content reuse in quasi real-time encourages the development of automatic systems such as the one described in this paper for source code reuse detection. Our approach is based on the comparison of programs at character level. It is able to find potential cases of reuse across a huge number of assignments. It achieved better results than JPlag, the most used online system to find similarities among multiple sets of source codes. The most common obfuscation operations we found were changes in identifier names, comments and indentation. 2014 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Comput Appl Eng Educ 23:383–390, 2015; View this article online at wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/cae; DOI 10.1002/cae.21608Flores Sáez, E.; Barrón Cedeño, LA.; Moreno Boronat, LA.; Rosso, P. (2015). Uncovering source code reuse in large-scale academic environments. Computer Applications in Engineering Education. 23(3):383-390. doi:10.1002/cae.21608S38339023

Grand Challenges of Traceability: The Next Ten Years

In 2007, the software and systems traceability community met at the first Natural Bridge symposium on the Grand Challenges of Traceability to establish and address research goals for achieving effective, trustworthy, and ubiquitous traceability. Ten years later, in 2017, the community came together to evaluate a decade of progress towards achieving these goals. These proceedings document some of that progress. They include a series of short position papers, representing current work in the community organized across four process axes of traceability practice. The sessions covered topics from Trace Strategizing, Trace Link Creation and Evolution, Trace Link Usage, real-world applications of Traceability, and Traceability Datasets and benchmarks. Two breakout groups focused on the importance of creating and sharing traceability datasets within the research community, and discussed challenges related to the adoption of tracing techniques in industrial practice. Members of the research community are engaged in many active, ongoing, and impactful research projects. Our hope is that ten years from now we will be able to look back at a productive decade of research and claim that we have achieved the overarching Grand Challenge of Traceability, which seeks for traceability to be always present, built into the engineering process, and for it to have "effectively disappeared without a trace". We hope that others will see the potential that traceability has for empowering software and systems engineers to develop higher-quality products at increasing levels of complexity and scale, and that they will join the active community of Software and Systems traceability researchers as we move forward into the next decade of research

Grand Challenges of Traceability: The Next Ten Years

In 2007, the software and systems traceability community met at the first Natural Bridge symposium on the Grand Challenges of Traceability to establish and address research goals for achieving effective, trustworthy, and ubiquitous traceability. Ten years later, in 2017, the community came together to evaluate a decade of progress towards achieving these goals. These proceedings document some of that progress. They include a series of short position papers, representing current work in the community organized across four process axes of traceability practice. The sessions covered topics from Trace Strategizing, Trace Link Creation and Evolution, Trace Link Usage, real-world applications of Traceability, and Traceability Datasets and benchmarks. Two breakout groups focused on the importance of creating and sharing traceability datasets within the research community, and discussed challenges related to the adoption of tracing techniques in industrial practice. Members of the research community are engaged in many active, ongoing, and impactful research projects. Our hope is that ten years from now we will be able to look back at a productive decade of research and claim that we have achieved the overarching Grand Challenge of Traceability, which seeks for traceability to be always present, built into the engineering process, and for it to have "effectively disappeared without a trace". We hope that others will see the potential that traceability has for empowering software and systems engineers to develop higher-quality products at increasing levels of complexity and scale, and that they will join the active community of Software and Systems traceability researchers as we move forward into the next decade of research

The Stores Model of Code Cognition

Program comprehension is perhaps one of the oldest topics within the psychology of programming. It addresses a central issue: how programmers work with and manipulate source code to construct effective software systems. Models can play an important role in understanding the challenges developers and engineers contend with. This paper presents a model of program comprehension, or code cognition, which has been derived from literature found within the disciplines of computing and psychology. Drawing on direct experimentation, this paper argues that a model of code cognition should take account of the visual, spatial and linguistic abilities of developers. The strengths and weaknesses of this model are discussed and further research directions presented

Developing Predictive Molecular Maps of Human Disease through Community-based Modeling

The failure of biology to identify the molecular causes of disease has led to disappointment in the rate of development of new medicines. By combining the power of community-based modeling with broad access to large datasets on a platform that promotes reproducible analyses we can work towards more predictive molecular maps that can deliver better therapeutics

Data fluidity in DARIAH -- pushing the agenda forward

This paper provides both an update concerning the setting up of the European DARIAH infrastructure and a series of strong action lines related to the development of a data centred strategy for the humanities in the coming years. In particular we tackle various aspect of data management: data hosting, the setting up of a DARIAH seal of approval, the establishment of a charter between cultural heritage institutions and scholars and finally a specific view on certification mechanisms for data

Issues of quality assurance in the management of plagiarism in blended learning environments

Increasing access to and availability of electronic resources presents students with a rich library of opportunities for independent study. But students also find themselves in the confusing territory of how they should best use these resources within their assessment activities. Likewise, teaching institutions are faced with the problems of plagiarism and collusion, and the challenges of educating, deterring, detecting, and dealing with breaches of policy in a fair and consistent way across all disciplines. This paper examines issues of quality assurance in the management of plagiarism by discussing the following questions: – How can effective automated plagiarism detection services be introduced and managed across the institution? – What teaching and assessment practices can be adopted to deter plagiarism? – What part should collusion and plagiarism detection tools play in educating and deterring students? – What are appropriate penalties for plagiarism and collusion and how can these be applied consistently across disciplines? Drawing together three distinct strands of research, in both distance and campus based institutions, the authors discuss how practice and policy have evolved in recent years in an attempt to reduce the incidence of plagiarism and collusion. The paper will illustrate this evolution by reporting on recent developments in assessment strategy, detection tools, and policy within two UK HE Institutions: The UK Open University and Manchester Metropolitan University

A Review and Analysis of Process at the Nexus of Instructional and Software Design

This dissertation includes a literature review and a single case analysis at the nexus of instructional design and technology and software development. The purpose of this study is to explore the depth and breadth of educational software design and development processes, and educational software reuse, with the intent of uncovering barriers to software development, software re-use and software replication in educational contexts. First, a thorough review of the academic literature was conducted on a representative sampling of educational technology studies. An examination of a 15-year time period within four representative journals identified 72 studies that addressed educational software to some extent. An additional sampling of the initial results identified 50 of those studies that discussed software the development process. These were further analyzed for evidence of software re-use and replication. Review results found a lack of reusable and/or replication-focused reports of instructional software development in educational technology journals, but found some reporting of educational technology reuse and replication from articles outside of educational technology. Based on the analysis, possible reasons for this occurrence are discussed. The author then proposes how a model for conducting and presenting instructional software design and development research based on the constructs of design-based research and cultural-historical activity theory might help mitigate this gap. Finally, the author presents a qualitative analysis of the software development process within a large, design-based educational technology project using cultural-historical activity theory (CHAT) as a lens. Using CHAT, the author seeks to uncover contradictions between the working worlds of instructional design and technology and software development with the intent of demonstrating how to mitigate tensions between these systems, and ultimately to increase the likelihood of reusable/replicable educational technologies. Findings reveal myriad tensions and social contradictions centered around the translation of instructional goals and requirements into software design and development tasks. Based on these results, the researcher proposes an educational software development framework called the iterative and integrative instructional software design framework that may help alleviate these tensions and thus make educational software design and development more productive, transparent, and replicable