Background and Context: Students' programming projects are often assessed on the basis of their tests as well as their implementations, most commonly using test adequacy criteria like branch coverage, or, in some cases, mutation analysis. As a result, students are implicitly encouraged to use these tools during their development process (i.e., so…

Understanding software modelers' difficulties and evaluating their performance is crucial to Model-Driven Engineering (MDE) education. The software modeling process contains fine-grained information about the modelers' analysis and thought processes. However, existing research primarily focuses on identifying obvious issues in the software…

While there have been many calls for teaching ethics and responsible computing, it is unclear how responsible computing instruction and technical learning interact. Some instructors even hesitate to include ethics in their courses, fearing it might distract students from learning technical computing content. An approach called…

Domain models in software engineering--often represented as class diagrams--depict relevant classes in a given problem domain along with necessary relationships among those classes. These models are important because they establish links between the requirements of a given system under development and the subsequent phases of the systems…

Objectives: Code style is an important aspect of text-based programming because programs written with good style are considered easier to understand and change and so improve the maintainability of the delivered software product. However teaching code style is complicated by the existence of many style guides and standards that contain…

Project managers tend to confront multiple challenges in Global Software Development (GSD), including misunderstandings about the project requirements, complex estimations of costs, risks, and efforts, along with increases in task allocation and a lack of coordination. "Soft skills" play a fundamental role in solving these challenges, as…

Novice programmers often encounter difficulties performing debugging tasks effectively. Even if modern development environments (IDEs) provide high-level support for navigating through code elements and for identifying the right conditions leading to the bug, debugging still requires considerable human effort. Programmers usually have to make…

Teachers deal with plagiarism on a regular basis, so they try to prevent and detect plagiarism, a task that is complicated by the large size of some classes. Students who cheat often try to hide their plagiarism (obfuscate), and many different similarity detection engines (often called plagiarism detection tools) have been built to help teachers.…

Design is a distinct discipline with its own practices, tools, professions, and areas of scholarship. However, practitioners from other fields often leverage aspects of design in their own work, leading to subfields like engineering design and architecture design that are neither wholly design nor wholly the intersecting discipline. Similarly,…

Many practitioners might struggle with becoming productive in different software engineering (SE) roles due to misalignment of the skills learnt during the university time with what is expected in the industry. Companies spend significant resources to train the personnel, whose academic backgrounds are not only based on "computing…

Objectives: Communication skills are crucial for effective software development teams, but those skills are difficult to teach. The goal of our project is to evaluate the effectiveness of teaching face-to-face communication skills using AVW-Space, a platform for video-based learning that provides personalized nudges to support student's engagement…

Assessing team software development projects is notoriously difficult and typically based on subjective metrics. To help make assessments more rigorous, we conducted an empirical study to explore relationships between subjective metrics based on peer and instructor assessments, and objective metrics based on GitHub and chat data. We studied 23…

As the importance of non-technical skills in the software engineering industry increases, the skill sets of graduates match less and less with industry expectations. A growing body of research exists that attempts to identify this skill gap. However, only few so far explicitly compare opinions of the industry with what is currently being taught in…

Learning to respond to a computer program that is not working as intended is often characterized as finding a singular bug causing a singular problem. This framing underemphasizes the wide range of ways that students and teachers could notice discrepancies from their intention, propose causes of those discrepancies, and implement interventions.…

Female-focused, grassroots communities purporting to help women learn to code are popping up in a variety of settings, indicating the motivation on the part of the participants to evade male-dominated settings while learning. However, little is known about how these groups function as an activity system. With current technology enabling the…