GOOD CODING PRACTICES NEED AN ADVOCATE INSIDE THE TEAM (OR IT WON'T WORK)
A few years ago, we looked into how teams deal with the technical debt in a software engineering project course (DOI to paper). One of the main takeaway from the focus group that followed an extensive data analysis (of the evolution of the quality of the code of 8 teams) and a survey (with 25 responses, being 40-ish % of the class) is that the adoption of clean code practices seem to be strongly influenced by a charismatic and engaged “team leader”. From a literature review (to appear soon at EASE, preprint here), we observed that the same pattern, i.e. the need for strong advocates in teams, exist for automated software testing in industry context. From these two studies, I believe that “old” XP advocates actually got it right and we have failed miserably to listen to them. Therefore, we felt into the same trap as before, i.e. process rigidity and putting the process before the people (and when I say “we”, I think education and industry).
Read moreTEACHING ABOUT SCRUM WITH PAPER
I’ll talk about how we teach about Scrum events and principles in a gamified context. First of all, the whole credit goes to Sonja Hof et al.. You may check their paper (just click on Sonja’s name, it’s a hyperref) that we modified a little and tried to adapt to fix the issues they witnessed in their experiment. One day, I actually should try to contact that team to see if they still do this tutorial and if they changed anything.
Read moreMOVING TO A PARTIAL FLIPPED CLASSROOM
This year I tried something “revolutionary”: asking my third year students to read some material before coming to class. Well, I must admit, this has had mixed success and here is why.
Read moreGLAD YOU'RE HERE!
I’ve finally set up a personal website to sort all of my research and teaching material.
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