Emergent requirements for supporting introductory programming

The problems associated with learning and teaching first year University Computer Science (CS1) programming classes are summarized showing that various support tools and techniques have been developed and evaluated. From this review of applicable support the paper derives ten requirements that a support tool should have in order to improve CS1 student success rate with respect to learning and understanding

A Case Study in Refactoring Functional Programs

Refactoring is the process of redesigning existing code without changing its functionality. Refactoring has recently come to prominence in the OO community. In this paper we explore the prospects for refactoring functional programs. Our paper centres on the case study of refactoring a 400 line Haskell program written by one of our students. The case study illustrates the type and variety of program manipulations involved in refactoring. Similarly to other program transformations, refactorings are based on program equivalences, and thus ultimately on language semantics. In the context of functional languages, refactorings can be based on existing theory and program analyses. However, the use of program transformations for program restructuring emphasises a different kind of transformation from the more traditional derivation or optimisation: characteristically, they often require wholesale changes to a collection of modules, and although they are best controlled by programmers, their application may require nontrivial semantic analyses. The paper also explores the background to refactoring, provides a taxonomy for describing refactorings and draws some conclusions about refactoring for functional programs

Beyond Automated Assessment: Building Metacognitive Awareness in Novice Programmers in CS1

The primary task of learning to program in introductory computer science courses (CS1) cognitively overloads novices and must be better supported. Several recent studies have attempted to address this problem by understanding the role of metacognitive awareness in novices learning programming. These studies have focused on teaching metacognitive awareness to students by helping them understand the six stages of learning so students can know where they are in the problem-solving process, but these approaches are not scalable. One way to address scalability is to implement features in an automated assessment tool (AAT) that build metacognitive awareness in novice programmers. Currently, AATs that provide feedback messages to students can be said to implement the fifth and sixth learning stages integral to metacognitive awareness: implement solution (compilation) and evaluate implemented solution (test cases). The computer science education (CSed) community is actively engaged in research on the efficacy of compile error messages (CEMs) and how best to enhance them to maximize student learning and it is currently heavily disputed whether or not enhanced compile error messages (ECEMs) in AATs actually improve student learning. The discussion on the effectiveness of ECEMs in AATs remains focused on only one learning stage critical to metacognitive awareness in novices: implement solution. This research carries out an ethnomethodologically-informed study of CS1 students via think-aloud studies and interviews in order to propose a framework for designing an AAT that builds metacognitive awareness by supporting novices through all six stages of learning. The results of this study provide two important contributions. The first is the confirmation that ECEMs that are designed from a human-factors approach are more helpful for students than standard compiler error messages. The second important contribution is that the results from the observations and post-assessment interviews revealed the difficulties novice programmers often face to developing metacognitive awareness when using an AAT. Understanding these barriers revealed concrete ways to help novice programmers through all six stages of the problem-solving process. This was presented above as a framework of features, which when implemented properly, provides a scalable way to implicitly produce metacognitive awareness in novice programmers

Software Engineers' Information Seeking Behavior in Change Impact Analysis - An Interview Study

Software engineers working in large projects must navigate complex information landscapes. Change Impact Analysis (CIA) is a task that relies on engineers' successful information seeking in databases storing, e.g., source code, requirements, design descriptions, and test case specifications. Several previous approaches to support information seeking are task-specific, thus understanding engineers' seeking behavior in specific tasks is fundamental. We present an industrial case study on how engineers seek information in CIA, with a particular focus on traceability and development artifacts that are not source code. We show that engineers have different information seeking behavior, and that some do not consider traceability particularly useful when conducting CIA. Furthermore, we observe a tendency for engineers to prefer less rigid types of support rather than formal approaches, i.e., engineers value support that allows flexibility in how to practically conduct CIA. Finally, due to diverse information seeking behavior, we argue that future CIA support should embrace individual preferences to identify change impact by empowering several seeking alternatives, including searching, browsing, and tracing.Comment: Accepted for publication in the proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Program Comprehensio

Are Delayed Issues Harder to Resolve? Revisiting Cost-to-Fix of Defects throughout the Lifecycle

Many practitioners and academics believe in a delayed issue effect (DIE); i.e. the longer an issue lingers in the system, the more effort it requires to resolve. This belief is often used to justify major investments in new development processes that promise to retire more issues sooner. This paper tests for the delayed issue effect in 171 software projects conducted around the world in the period from 2006--2014. To the best of our knowledge, this is the largest study yet published on this effect. We found no evidence for the delayed issue effect; i.e. the effort to resolve issues in a later phase was not consistently or substantially greater than when issues were resolved soon after their introduction. This paper documents the above study and explores reasons for this mismatch between this common rule of thumb and empirical data. In summary, DIE is not some constant across all projects. Rather, DIE might be an historical relic that occurs intermittently only in certain kinds of projects. This is a significant result since it predicts that new development processes that promise to faster retire more issues will not have a guaranteed return on investment (depending on the context where applied), and that a long-held truth in software engineering should not be considered a global truism.Comment: 31 pages. Accepted with minor revisions to Journal of Empirical Software Engineering. Keywords: software economics, phase delay, cost to fi

Searching for a feminist voice: Film festivals and negotiating the tension between expectation and intent

International Film Festivals play a vital role in shaping filmmakers’ careers. This paper presents some initial findings from a current major research project, highlighting the significance of particular festival programming of emerging female directors from developing nations. Some filmmakers showcased at festivals actively privilege the voices of women in their films as a means of commenting on pressing cultural and political issues. Ironically, other filmmakers do not subscribe to the label of “feminist” or “woman filmmaker”, even if their respective films represent a strongly coded woman’s point of view. Tensions also arise inevitably when scrutinising women filmmakers from developing nations within a first world film festival context. The expectations of the researcher, the festival, film critics and audiences inevitably must negotiate with the original intentions of the filmmaker. This paper explores the significance of women filmmakers in attendance at the Brisbane International Film Festival (2009) and the International Film Festival Rotterdam (2010)

Possibilities of Enacting and Researching Epistemic Communities

This article explores what the concept of epistemic community can contribute to studies of science and technology and to existing analytical frames of epistemic cultures, technosocial network and community of practice. Reviewing conceptions of epistemic community in political science, organisational studies and feminist epistemologies I suggest that heuristic dimensions include a focus on historical contingencies and timings; on particular epistemic projects and technologies that work as boundary objects; and on epistemic responsibilities and stratifications. These dimensions are further explored in two research vignettes. The first vignette follows the mobilisation and expectations of the Czech synchrotron user community at a funding event as a focal point for examining epistemic responsibilities and the genderings of community. The second vignette follows a biographical narrative about being and becoming a member of an epistemic community and amplifies the importance of different configurations of community. I argue that the contours, distributions and textures of an epistemic community cannot be studied at a single analytical site such as the laboratory and conclude by outlining what can be gained by using a refined concept of epistemic communities and sketching some strategies for further research.Epistemic Community, Epistemic Responsibility, Epistemic Cultures, Community of Practice, Gendering of Community, Synchrotron User Community