Using automated source code analysis for software evolution

Software maintenance is one of the most expensive and time-consuming phases in the software life-cycle. The size and complexity of commercial applications probably present the greatest difficulty that maintainers face when making changes to their applications. As a result of the corresponding loss of understanding, business knowledge encapsulated within the system becomes fragmented, and any changes made as a result of new business initiatives become difficult to implement and hence may mean a loss of business opportunities. This paper outlines an approach to regaining understanding of software which has been used in the Release project at Durham University. This approach involves determining the calling structure of a program in terms of a call-graph, and from this call-graph extracting a dominance tree. Various problems which have been encountered during the construction of tools to perform this task are described

Learning in the classroom of the future

A free webinar with Professor Liz Burd & Dr Emma Mercie

Building realism into the use of MOOCS and flipped classroom

Liz will talk about her work on financial and enrolment requirements relating to MOOC business viability. She will indicate where the challenges and are how some of these issues can be overcome and how others are just more challenging. She will present an opportunity to explore the use of MOOCs with the flipped classroom. The flipped classroom is an approach where content is provided in advance to students and instead of the traditional lecture the time is spent interacting with students through worked examples etc. Liz will examine impacts on student learning, but also consider how to make this approach manageable to staff workloads and how lecture theatres design can be altered to facilitate this new way of learning

Improving visual representations of code

This work was done in 1997 at the Centre for Software Maintenance at the University of DurhamThe contents of this paper describe the work carried out by the Visual Research Group in the Centre for Software Maintenance at the University of Durham.Publisher PD

Does an Avatar Motivate?

The purpose of this study is to investigate students’ perceptionsof their motivation to learn while possessing an avatar along side the learning activities. The activities include attendance and accessing the course module’s eLearning portal.47students participated in the study and were divided into two groups:an avatar group and a non-avatar group. Additionally, two research instruments were used in the study. Firstly,an avatar environment named Avatar Hall was developed to allow the students from the avatar group to view their avatars.The second instrument was a motivation inventory, which was used to identify the students’ perceptions of the extent to which the presence of an avatar motivated them to learn. The results for both groups show a moderate percentage distribution of the students’ perceptions of their motivation to learn and further statistical test reveal no significant difference between the two groups of students in terms of their motivation to learn

Using feedback tags and sentiment analysis to generate sharable learning resources: investigating automated sentiment analysis of feedback tags in a programming course

This paper demonstrates how sentiment analysis can be used to identify differences in how students and staff perceive the opinions contained in feedback for programming work. The feedback considered in this paper is conceptually different in that it is given in the form of tags that when associated with a fragment of source code can be considered as a sharable learning resource. The research presented investigates the differences in perception of whether feedback is positive, negative or neutral according to students and examiners. This paper also investigates the adequacy of an automated sentiment analysis engine with a view that sentiment information when combined with the feedback tag and source code may create a more informative sharable learning resource. This paper describes the investigatory technique and presents the initial results. Results indicate that there are important differences between the sentiment of feedback perceived by students and examiners. This paper highlights the benefit of including sentiment data along with feedback

Getting Sustainable Development into the Curriculum

Industry and government are in agreement that students graduating from higher education need to be more aware of social, ethical, and cultural issues prior to entering the workforce [1, 2]. The UK government is particularly vocal in its belief that undergraduates should graduate with a good understanding of sustainable development issues [2]. Finding a way to include additional and complex content into a heavily timetabled computer science undergraduate degree programme is difficult. Within Durham a Sustainable Development Workshop, that takes the form of a competition between tutorial groups, has been developed as a means to introduce the subject into the curriculum. This paper provides details of, and reflections on, our first attempt at this workshop and outlines our planned changes for next year

Collaborative software design using multi-touch tables

The use of Multi-touch interfaces for collaborative learning has received significant attention. Their ability to synchronously accommodate multiple users is an advantage in co-located collaborative design tasks. This paper explores the Multi-touch interface’s potential in collaborative Unified Modeling Language diagramming by comparing it to a PC-based tool, looking at the Collaborative Learning Skills and amount of physical interactions in both conditions. The results show that even though participants talked more in the PC-based condition, the use of the Multi-touch table increased the amount of physical interactions, and encouraged the “Creative Conflict ” skills amongst the team members