02:00 - 02:30

• The Development of a Dashboard Tool for Visualising Online Teamwork Discussions

  Many software development organisations today adopt global software engineering (GSE) and agile models, requiring software engineers to collaborate and develop software in flexible, distributed, online teams. However, many employers have expressed concern that graduates lack teamwork skills and one of the most commonly occurring problems with GSE models are issues with project management. Team managers and educators often oversee a number of teams and the large corpus of data, in combination with agile models, make it difficult to efficiently assess factors such as team role distribution and emotional climate. Current methods and tools for monitoring software engineering (SE) teamwork in both industry and education settings typically focus on member contributions, reflection, or product outcomes, which are limited in terms of real-time feedback and accurate behavioural analysis. We have created a dashboard that extracts and communicates team role distribution and team emotion information in real-time. Our proof of concept provides a real-time analysis of teamwork discussions and visualises team member emotions, the roles they have adopted and overall team sentiment during the course of a collaborative problem-solving project. We demonstrate and discuss how such a tool could be useful for SE team management and training and the development of teamwork skills in SE university courses.

Rebecca Vivian; Hamid Tarmazdi; Katrina Falkner; Nickolas Falkner; Claudia Szabo

University of Adelaide, Australia

02:30 - 03:00

• Software Design Studio: A Practical Example

  We have been generally successful for transferring software engineering knowledge to industry through various forms of education. However, many challenges in software engineering training remain. A key amongst these is how best to energise software engineering education with real-world software engineering practices. This paper describes our experience of delivering a radically different approach based on the notion of a Software Design Studio. The Software Design Studio is both a lab for students engaged in conceiving, designing and developing software products as well as an approach for teaching software engineering in the lab which emphasizes practical hands-on work and experimentation. The feedback on the Software Design Studio – from both staff and students – has been outstanding. Although the programme is designed as a small, elite programme there is interest to see if the teaching methods can be transferred across to the much larger undergraduate programme in Computer Science. In this paper, we provide a detailed description of how our studio works in practice so that others, thinking of taking a studio or studio-inspired approach, can use in designing their own courses.

Jaejoon Lee; Gerald Kotonya; Jon Whittle; Christopher Bull

Lancaster University, UK

03:00 - 03:30

• Code Hunt: Experience with Coding Contests at Scale

  Mastering a complex skill like programming takes many hours. In order to encourage students to put in these hours, we built Code Hunt, a game that enables players to program against the computer with clues provided as unit tests. The game has become very popular and we are now running worldwide contests where students have a fixed amount of time to solve a set of puzzles. This paper describes Code Hunt and the contest experience it offers. We then show some early results that demonstrate how Code Hunt can accurately discriminate between good and bad coders. The challenges of creating and selecting puzzles for contests are covered. We end up with a short description of our course experience, and some figures that show that Code Hunt is enjoyed by women and men alike.

Judith Bishop; Nigel Horspool; Tao Xie; Nikolai Tillmann; Jonathan de Halleux

Microsoft Research, USA; University of Victoria, Canada; University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA