Conference Notes

 The theme of the conference was  Scalability in Software Engineering Education and Training  Several topics related to the theme were discussed including new courses, redesign of courses, new skills, and industry/university partnerships

Main comments from discussions CS students not equipped with problem solving skills Lack training in Requirements elicitation No training in project estimations Gap between academia and industry required skills Lack of communication skills

 Suggestions to address these issues  New courses Example – Requirements Engineering & Management training for SW development professionals, focusing on Learning writing skills Communication skills – soft skills Prioritization Negotiation skills Modeling and specifications Instructional model includes – first start with small exercise, followed by instruction, repeat same exercise after instruction

 Using Rich Multimedia Case Studies (CMU): Developing a Scalable Authoring Platform  Case studies are scarce, not available, time consuming to record, requires talented people to compile cases  But they are very useful Case Based Teaching puts people/students in a role playing scenario and forces communication Teachers and students learn from each other and learn by doing.  This tool will enable practitioners to capture their observations and compile cases

 Scaling Performance Engineering Training & Certification Across a Very Large Enterprise  Performance Engineering Expertise is required to Analyze non functional requirements Capacity Planning Build a scalable architecture  Traditional approach of one group of PE catering to all projects is not enough due to the significant growth in IT projects

 Solution  Train at least 10% of engineers in this aspect at level 1 including testing and analysis of results, this analysis is most important  Study Used HP load runner 8.0  Results Self study did not work Video recordings silmiar to Elluminate worked well More number of years as developers – less % of passes Book smart not equal to street smart!!

 Global and Competition-based Model for Fostering Technical and Soft Skills in Software Engineering Education  Presented a paper on their experiences dealing with different groups geographically located in different countries  Started with 2 countries, now work with 5 countries

 Main findings  Inexperienced students were stressed out at first signs of problems  Higher levels of communication within teams especially with coaches and auditors provided greater success  Socialization also helped in increasing productivity

 XNA was used and evaluated to teach SA and SE course for Masters Students  Main Research Questions R1: To what degree does the COTS influence the learning process? R2: How much time is spent on technical matters and on architectural matters? R3: How difficult is it to integrate known architectural and design patterns and learn the necessary prerequisite skills to be able to develop programs? R4: How much do the students feel they have learned about SA through the game development project?

 Analysis of Responses – Sample R1: To what degree does the COTS influenced the learning process? The requirements gathering and specification: Reflected in Q1 of Table 2, the result did not show that the COTS made a significant impact on requirements phase of the project. The design of the architecture: From Q2, most of students agreed that the COTS did not hinder design of a good architecture. The major reason is that XNA supports different types of games development with flexible architecture.

 How difficult was it to integrate known architectural and design patterns and learn the necessary prerequisite skills to be able to develop programs? results show that majority students disagree that they spent too much time learning the COTS. Also, from our own experience, we received almost no help requests from students’ groups.

 How much did the students feel they have learned about SA through the project? From the results of Q9, most of the students feel they have learned a lot about SA throughout the project. For the negative attitude in result, probably due to the first time to use XNA in teaching and some of students might have become spellbound by the fun of creating a game, thus focusing more on game play than architecture.

 R2: How much time is spent on technical matters and on architectural matters? From Q7, the choice of COTS influences the time the students have at their disposal to focus on architectural matters. From our own experience, the XNA environment is much more user-friendly with a high-level API, the probable reason was that many students were completely new to both C# and XNA