Subject-level quality assurance in computing: experiences from three national perspectives.

This paper examines some aspects of the Quality Assurance processes in Computing departments in three European universities. We first examine the operation of a quality assurance activity in the School of Computer Science in Iceland. The next case is an example from Sweden and finally we present a case from the United Kingdom. In each case, we examine the motivation for the outcome-based assurance methodologies that predominate in countries that are engaged in the Bologna Process in terms of the use of competence-based assessment. We compare the application of these processes to departmental review, focusing on the aims and objectives, who controls the process, the areas covered, the methodology and the use to which the information is put. We discuss some of the implications for teaching when different quality assurance processes are used and finally, we make some observations about the relatively sparse literature on Computing Education subject-specific quality assurance

Quality assurance using international curricula and employer feedback.

The focus of this paper is the quality assurance process for the bachelor program in the School of Computer Science at Reykjavik University, which is a combination of outcome- and process-oriented quality assurance. Faculty members and employers of graduates provided information for the quality assessment. The results provide both detailed quantitative data and more qualitative information that give all stakeholders a variety of ways to interpret the status of the quality of education. This type of assessment has raised the awareness of the faculty members on how abstract topics and learning outcomes from an international standard can be used when revising the curricula of a particular course. A notable feature of this type of analysis is its use of employer-generated data to examine graduate knowledge and skills. The contribution of the paper is to provide an example of how a quality assurance process can be made more valuable to both faculty and degree stakeholders by combining outcome- and process-oriented quality assurance strategies

Students envisioning the future.

How can students be included as critical stakeholders in the systems and services provided by a university? To address the whole student experience, we engaged students and employees at a large Swedish university in a vision seminar process to elicit how these groups envisioned an ideal future university, and the necessary changes to technology and organisational structures required to achieve this ideal version. The process entailed six four-hour workshops with four groups consisting of six participants each. A survey instrument was used to follow up on the participants' experiences of participating in the vision seminar process and their thoughts on the future of the university. The results show that the participating students were more positive compared to the university employees. The students envisioned harmonized interdepartmental systems, seamlessly integrating a variety of services into one university-provided solution. The employees envisioned their future work as flexible, enabled by technology providing excellent support without hindering pedagogical and organisational development. Using technological frames, these visions of the future are identified, analysed and discussed in relation to the quality of university education and a holistic view on students' university experience. Finally we discuss the broader implications of the visions on the future of university education

A systematic mapping study of HCI practice research

Human–computer interaction (HCI) practice has emerged as a research domain in the HCI field and is growing. The need to transfer HCI practices to the industry began significantly with the works of Nielsen on usability engineering. To date, methods and techniques for designing, evaluating, and implementing interactive systems for human use have continued to emerge. It is, therefore, justified to conduct a systematic mapping study to determine the landscape of HCI practice research. A Systematic Mapping Study method was used to map 142 studies according to research type, topic, and contribution. These were then analyzed to determine an overview of HCI practice research. The objective was to analyze studies on HCI practice and present prominent issues that characterize the HCI practice research landscape. Second, to identify pressing challenges regarding HCI practices in software/systems development companies. The results show that HCI practice research has steadily increased since 2012. The majority of the studies explored focused on evaluation research that largely contributed to the evaluation methods or processes. Most of the studies were on design tools and techniques, design methods and contexts, design work and organizational culture, and collaboration and team communication. Interviews, case studies, and survey methods have been prominently used as research methods. HCI techniques are mostly used during the initial phase of development and during evaluation. HCI practice challenges in companies are mostly process-related and on performance of usability and user experience activities. The major challenge seems to be to find a way to collect and incorporate user feedback in a timely manner, especially in agile processes. There are areas identified in this study as needing more research

Aligning quality assurance at the course unit and educational program levels.

Quality assurance is a subject that has grown dramatically in importance in recent times. In previous work, we have described how the ACM Curricula can be used to support the Quality Assurance process of educational programs, using the Computer Science program at Reykjavik University as an example. Faculty members and employers of graduates participated in the process, that resulted in providing both detailed quantitative data and qualitative information. The assessment also raised awareness of how abstract topics and learning outcomes from an international standard can be used when revising the curricula of a particular course in a CS program. Quality assurance is indeed a continuous process, where the results of evaluations should be used to drive improvements. In this paper we focus on how a Database course was re-structured based on a recent quality assurance process

Listen to your users : The effect of usability evaluation on software development practice

A vast majority of the people in the western world use software systems on daily basis for achieving their goals. To be able to do that each person needs to communicate what he or she wants to do to the system and receive a response. This communication needs to be easy for the user, especially when the system is new to him or her. Otherwise, the user either quits using the system; it takes a very long time or gets very irritated. A software team that is making new software needs to evaluate the usability of the system and various methods have been introduced in the literature to do that. My research focus in this thesis is on usability evaluation. I study particularly, how usability evaluation methods can be compared, what data should be gathered in usability evaluation to gain knowledge on how the software affects users who are getting new software for their daily work and how useful this data is to the recipients. Two experiments are reported in this thesis where results from using three different usability evaluation methods are compared. The main result from these two studies is that the think-aloud evaluation method should be used, if the goal of the evaluation is to gather as realistic information as possible on usability problems that the users will have when using the system. Furthermore four case studies are described in the thesis, in which usability evaluation was done by using the think-aloud method in co-operation with real users in their real work situation. These studies give much richer information on the actual use of the systems involved. The findings from one of these case studies indicate that the results from user observation done on a system that users have not seen before or used only for few days are rather similar to the results from usability evaluation done when users have used the system for a longer period. So the common practice of doing user observation on a software system that the participants have not seen before and then interpreting that the results will be the same for actual usage of the system when users will use the system for their real tasks for shorter or longer period is adequate

Reducing the gap between HCI research and software development teams in Iceland

This paper reports a recent study on the use of User Centered Design (UCD) methods in seven Icelandic companies developing software. Contextual Interviews (CI) were used to gather detailed data on how developers co-operate with users during the software development. Afterwards structured interviews were conducted to gather broader information on the UCD methods usage and background information. Using Contextual Interviews for data gathering was very successful when used in its original form, but the method had to be adjusted in some cases because the developers thought that the situation, when cooperating with users was too delicate to add an observer to the scene