Software Engineering Topics Research Articles

Replication of empirical studies in software engineering research: a systematic mapping study

In this article, we present a systematic mapping study of replications in software engineering. The goal is to plot the landscape of current published replications of empirical studies in software engineering research. We applied the systematic review method to search and select published articles, and to extract and synthesize data from the selected articles that reported replications. Our search retrieved more than 16,000 articles, from which we selected 96 articles, reporting 133 replications performed between 1994 and 2010, of 72 original studies. Nearly 70 % of the replications were published after 2004 and 70 % of these studies were internal replications. The topics of software requirements, software construction, and software quality concentrated over 55 % of the replications, while software design, configuration management, and software tools and methods were the topics with the smallest number of replications. We conclude that the number of replications has grown in the last few years, but the absolute number of replications is still small, in particular considering the breadth of topics in software engineering. We still need incentives to perform external replications, better standards to report empirical studies and their replications, and collaborative research agendas that could speed up development and publication of replications.

An Experience of Educational Innovation for the Collaborative Learning in Software Engineering

This paper describes the experience in collaborative learning based educational innovation for the Software Engineering Subject at the Telecommunications Engineering School of the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. We describe the context of evolution of the Software Engineering related subjects in the Masterâ??s degree in Telecommunications Engineering (specialization in Telematics) for their adaptation to the educational and organizational postulates of the European Space for Higher Education. In this context, we describe a pilot project for the adaptation of the Software Engineering Lab course, which includes the development and validation of a software engineering tool environment and a web platform for collaborative work.

Estimation Tools and Techniques

Estimating size or resources is one of the most important topics in software engineering and IT. You won't deliver according to expectations if you don't plan, and you can't plan if you don't know the underlying dependencies and estimates. This column is an overview of estimation. It covers estimation methods and provides an overview and evaluation of popular estimation tools.

Continuous assessment in software engineering

European convergence towards European Higher Education Area demands an important innovation process in the academic assessment system. In this sense, a model-based of student-centred learning, as a continuous assessment methodology, presents some advantages which are exposed in this paper thanks to the introduction of an additional assessment in the subject of software engineering. This article presents the principles, structure, contents and process of continuous assessment developed in the software engineering course at the program of Computer Science Education at the University of Salamanca. It also presents the results of the evaluation process as well as appreciations from students and teaching team.

Collaborative development of reusable educational resources for software engineering and information systems core subjects

In the context of the European Higher Education Area adaptation process, a group of teachers of the Computer Science degree of the University of Cadiz have developed an initiative for the collaborative creation of a set of educational resources that are used or supplemented in diverse courses of software engineering and information systems core subjects. This initiative has been implemented as the proposal of a project, which has been accepted in the context of a call for higher education innovation projects for teachers and researchers and is developed along the academic year 2008/2009.

Experts Urge Hospitals to Act on Integration

Hospitals have nearly five years to integrate medical devices with electronic health record (EHR) technology, in order to receive money from the federal government. But it’s important that biomeds and clinical engineers take steps now to ensure effective implementation. That was the main message from experts at a symposium during AAMI’s 2010 Annual Conference & Expo in Tampa, FL, in June. Nearly $20 billion in financial incentives was included in the 2009 American Recovery & Reinvestment Act to entice hospitals and physician offices to adopt “meaningful use” of EHRs. The Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) recently adopted a temporary certification program that authorizes organizations to test and certify EHR products. The first stage of meaningful use is scheduled to begin in 2011 with a set of objectives for hospitals and physicians to meet, with further goals coming in 2013 and 2015. In 2015, the meaningful-use requirements will include medical devices, with testing and technical standards to be released the year before, according to Elliot Sloane, research professor and director of the Health Systems Engineering Program at Drexel University in Philadelphia, and a speaker at the symposium, which was sponsored by the American College of Clinical Engineering (ACCE). “Use your purchasing programs to insist on interoperable technologies,” Sloane said. “Put EHR and software engineering topics on your reading list. Get to know the standards and deploy them.” Also, be ready to anticipate change. “Look at your structures and business model to see whether you are flexible enough to both proactively anticipate change that is coming and react to it,” added Linda Chan, information services manager at New Jersey-based Virtual Health Information Services. “We expanded our help desk to 24x7. We also spent over a year working with biomed and information technology (IT) departments to look at organization structure in support of device integration work, and a lot cross-training is needed.” “Know your systems,” stressed Erin Sparnon, senior project engineer at ECRI Institute. “If you are talking about meaningful use of integrating infusion pumps, think about what systems you have in your hospital right now.” Focus, Sparnon suggested, on some “easy wins” to get the ball rolling. “Maybe some things you can implement by 2011 with little fuss,” Sparnon said. “There might be an easy way to say to hospital administration, ‘Here is what we can Robert King is the editor of AAMI News. E-mail: rking@aami.org Experts Urge Hospitals to Act on Integration

Analogical Thinking Based Instruction Method in IT Professional Education

In designing a new teaching system, a challenging issue is how the system intelligently supports learners. This paper describes a methodology and a system design on the intelligent instruction support for software engineering education. For information science courses at a university, software engineering subjects are usually compulsory and students study dominant conceptions of implementation like software architecture, and the methodology of software design in software engineering lectures. To enhance learners’ understanding, the authors design a novel instructional model based on the analogical thinking theory. The analogical thinking-based instruction consists of concrete teaching methods like analogy dropping method, self role-play method, and the anthropomorphic thinking method. Questionnaires for learners after the instructions give results of effective education in an actual trial. The contribution of this paper is to provide a new instruction theory, the way of educational practice method, and implementation of the system.

Teaching Software Engineering with Free/Libre Open Source Projects

One of the major problems in software engineering education is the involvement of students in real world software projects. Industry projects are a solution, but in many cases they are hard to find and student participation can be problematic due to cultural, familiarization and other practical reasons. The abundance of Free / Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) projects is a neat solution, offering multi-lingual, multicultural environments in virtually every application domain, at different levels of project size, maturity, organization etc. The paper analyzes how acquisition of practical experience on several basic and advanced software engineering topics can be achieved by working in a FLOSS project. The kind of skills that can be acquired are those requested by the Overview Report for Computing Curricula by ACM and topics examined are those of the Software Engineering Body of Knowledge, by IEEE. Also software engineering areas that require special care or that may not prove suitable for such treatment are identified. Various isolated teaching cases pertaining to this approach are presented and discussed.

Surfing the net for software engineering notes

This column usually focuses on web sites that explore various software engineering topics such as requirements engineering, development methodologies, test strategies, data and database engineering and so on. This month, however, I thought I'd talk about the people who have contributed to the state of the software engineering art by developing and refining the approaches and methodologies that we use every day. Sometimes we take the simple things for granted. For example, the notion of software modules seems second nature to most of us. That would not have been true had it not been for David Parnas. So for this month's column I thought I'd focus on web sites dedicated to the people and, by extension, their work.

A software development course for CC2001

In this poster, we describe our experiences over the past three years in developing and delivering a compressed course in Software Development and Professional Practice for our computer science major. This course is one of the core courses in the CC2001 small department model and brings topics in software engineering, design, code writing and reading, computer ethics, and professional practice into the heart of the major. The poster describes the course, the topics we cover, how the course is delivered, what's worked and not worked, and how it has evolved over the last three years.

Scratching the surface of advanced topics in software engineering

A common approach for introducing computer science to middle school students is to teach them a simple yet engaging programming language A different approach is to teach them some advanced topic independent of any particular language or syntax We describe a 3-hour workshop module designed to do both This module has been piloted with a group of thirty 8th grade girls. It uses the Scratch programming language to develop the advanced software engineering concepts of specifications, refinement, and composition After this module, students were enthusiastic about continuing to program in Scratch independently and also felt they learned something about computer science as a discipline.

AN EMPIRICAL EXPLORATION OF SOFTWARE DEVELOPMENT QUALITY

This study uses data collected on students enrolled in a software development course to explore the role of Creative Self-Efficacy, Playfulness, and Self-Efficacy in the quality of the students’ software development process and projects using a theoretical model proposed by Chiravuri and Ambrose [4]. Instruction in the Carnegie Mellon Software Engineering Institute’s Personal Software Productivity (PSP) techniques was coupled with traditional software engineering topics providing an opportunity to measure both the student’s software development process and the quality of the software developed. Creative Self-Efficacy and Self-Efficacy were found to have a modest impact on the quality of the students’ software product.

An analysis of research topics in software engineering – 2006

This paper is the first in a new annual series whose goal is to answer the following question: what are the active research focuses within the field of software engineering? We considered 7 top journals and 7 top international conferences in software engineering and examined all the 691 papers published in these journals or presented at these conferences in 2006. Consequently, we have a number of findings. (1) Seventy-three percent of journal papers focus on 20% of subject indexes in software engineering, including Testing and Debugging (D.2.5), Management (D.2.9), and Software/Program Verification (D.2.4). (2) Eighty-nine percent of conference papers focus on 20% of subject indexes in software engineering, including Software/Program Verification (D.2.4), Testing and Debugging (D.2.5), and Design Tools and Techniques (D.2.2). (3) Seventy-seven percent of journal/conference papers focus on 20% of subject indexes in software engineering, including Testing and Debugging (D.2.5), Software/Program Verification (D.2.4), and Management (D.2.9). (4) The average number of references cited by a journal paper is about 33, whereas this number becomes around 24 for a conference paper.

Become a Star: Teaching the Process of Design and Implementation of an Intelligent System

An international association advancing the multidisciplinary study of informing systems. Founded in 1998, the Informing Science Institute (ISI) is a global community of academics shaping the future of informing science.

An investigation of software engineering curricula

We adapted a survey instrument developed by Timothy Lethbridge to assess the extent to which the education delivered by four UK universities matches the requirements of the software industry. We propose a survey methodology that we believe addresses the research question more appropriately than the one used by Lethbridge. In particular, we suggest that restricting the scope of the survey to address the question of whether the curricula for a specific university addressed the needs of its own students, allowed us to identify an appropriate target population. However, our own survey suffered from several problems. In particular the questions used in the survey are not ideal, and the response rate was poor.Although the poor response rate reduces the value of our results, our survey appears to confirm several of Lethbridge's observations with respect to the over-emphasis of mathematical topics and the under-emphasis on business topics. We also have a close agreement with respect to the relative importance of different software engineering topics. However the set of topics, that we found were taught far less than their importance would suggest, were quite different from the topics identified by Lethbridge.

Teaching software engineering in the computer science curriculum

The goals of computer science department and software engineering courses are not always clear as they could be, and exactly how much of a computer science curriculum should be spent on software engineering topics at the expense of topics with more immediate relevance to computer science majors is far from clear. Computer science students are sometimes skeptical about the relevance of software engineering course topics, particularly those who have had some experience in industry. They report that the techniques and procedures covered in standard software engineering texts are seldom used in industry. There is not enough communication between Industry and Academia, and graduates often must be re-trained for their new jobs. This is a proposal for a modification in the approach to software engineering education for computer science majors, and for clarification of the goals of computer science programs, and calls for procedures to increase the relevancy of computer science and software engineering courses to meet the needs of industry.

Assignment of Real-World Projects: An Economical Method of Building Applications for a University and an Effective Way to Enhance Education of the Students

Introduction The University of the Philippines Manila (UPM) is the premiere state university in the Philippines that specializes in courses for the health professions and is regarded as a health campus in the University of the Philippines System. It is composed of seven colleges consisting of the Arts and Sciences, Medicine, Nursing, Pharmacy, Allied Medical Professions, Public Health, Dentistry, the National Teacher Training Center--Health Profession, and the School of Health Sciences. At the heart of the University is the Philippine General Hospital, the premiere tertiary hospital in the country that serves as training ground for students. In 1996, the College of Arts and Sciences, through the Department of Physical Sciences and Mathematics (DPSM), launched the BS Computer Science program in line with the demand for more IT professionals in the health sciences. The program was initially adopted from an existing program at the University of the Philippines Los Banos. Although the subjects are basically the same for both degree programs, the degree program at UPM focused on addressing the problems of the health sector. Because of this, the BS Computer Science program of UPM is considered unique as there is no university in the Philippines that specializes in the development of computer specialists for the health sector. Each year only 30 students are accepted due to limited slot availability. A Need for Collaboration Due to budget cuts from the government, UP Manila's budget is centered mainly on maintenance of operations and salaries of employees. There is hardly any budget left for improvement of operations through application of information technology. The lack of resources paved the way for DPSM to pursue an active role in developing applications for UP Manila through its BS Computer Science program. Furthermore, DPSM believes that the BS Computer Science students will become more knowledgeable in their field by immersing them in the development of real world projects rather than working with case studies. Thus there is a need for collaboration between DPSM and the health profession colleges. Through this collaborative scheme, the health professional colleges will provide the necessary project requirements while DPSM will supervise the students in the construction of the software project. It is agreed that the students will be producing an evolutionary software prototype only since the project is still a part of the students' initial training. However, the resulting prototype may be used by the colleges in order to see a snapshot of their envisioned software project. Additionally, changes in the set of requirements can be made as well as installation of new features and functions can be determined. This collaboration strategy is similar to the one proposed by Mathieu (1993), Longo (1998), Harris (1995), Mehic and Al-Soufi (1999), Surendran and Young (2000) and Abbott et al. (2001; 1998) the main difference being in our strategy, the client is also from the same University and not from the industry. Our strategy aims not only to expose students to actual hands-on experience in developing information systems but also to bring technology to the academe with the least cost to the University as proposed by Van Over and Dangerfield (1993). The software prototype can later be enhanced by another group of students during their Practicum Class on the following term, by the same group of students working as student assistants but functioning as software developers, or by another group of students as main coursework for their Special Problem (Thesis). Setting the Foundations The strategy is implemented in the software engineering subject, a junior subject in the BS Computer Science curriculum. engineering as implemented in UP Manila is credited as a 3-unit subject comprising of a two-hour lecture and three-hour laboratory. It emphasizes Software Engineering in the Large or the application of software engineering principles to the development of a software product by a team equivalent to a small or moderate industry project as specified in the Guidelines for Engineering Education Version 1. …

Perspectives on Software Product Lines

Product line engineering is a recent concept and one of the hottest topics in software engineering aiming at synergy effects in software development. Diverse benefits like cost reduction, decreased time-to-market, and quality improvement can be expected from reuse of domain-specific software assets, several successful product line projects have been performed and documented [3]. Also non-technical benefits as result of network externalities, product branding, and sharing organizational costs have been observed.Following the remarkable success of the "First International Workshop on Software Product Lines: Economics, Architectures, and Implications" held at ICSE 2000 in Limerick [1], this second workshop stresses more the non-technical, that is, business and organizational aspects of product line adoption and institutionalization. Another major topic of interest are product line tools, as tool support seems to become more and more critical for the success of product line approaches. Different tool concepts have been proposed and discussed during the workshop. Requirements for tools and respective solutions seem to become more concrete, maybe resulting from the fact that the technical concepts and solutions of product line approaches are better understood and can therefore be better supported with tools.The strong emphasis on establishing contacts and giving experts and practitioners from academia and industry a platform for discussion has been continued during this second workshop.Section 2 of this workshop summary describes the formal structure of the workshop. In Section 3, a short summary of the invited talk on issues and opportunities in product line research is given. Section 4 summarizes key points of the presentations of the workshop participants that were given based on their submitted papers that are fully available at [2]. In Section 5, the plenary discussion is described and its major lessons learned are summarized. Section 6 concludes this paper.

Assessing the Process Maturity Utilized in Software Engineering Team Project Courses*

AbstractMany computer science departments offer an introductory software engineering course, which normally provides an introduction to software engineering topics in conjunction with a semester long team project. To ensure students acquire the correct lessons from this project experience, it is essential that the teams utilize well‐defined software development processes similar to those practiced by leading software development organizations. Since its inception, the Software Engineering Institute Capability Maturity Model (CMM) has served as a guide for organizations seeking to improve their development practices, through a self‐assessment questionnaire. In an effort to assess the maturity of development practices utilized in software engineering courses, an “academic” version of the CMM questionnaire was developed. This questionnaire was distributed to a sample of software engineering instructors in an effort to assess the maturity of academic software engineering course projects. The questionnaire and the survey results are presented and discussed.

SPECIFYING SOFTWARE ARCHITECTURAL CONNECTORS IN SAM

Software architecture has become one of the most active research topics in software engineering in recent years. One of the distinct features of software architecture research is to explicitly study the interconnections (connectors) among system components. In this paper, we show how to formally specify several well-known general connectors in a software architecture methodology called SAM. Related work is discussed and compared. Our results establish the basis for reusing these defined connectors and for building more sophisticated connectors from them.