In software engineering pedagogy, a persistent challenge is the comprehensive assessment of student contributions within software repositories. This study delves into the investigation of the Git-Truck tool, initially designed for professional software engineers, and explores its adaptability and effectiveness within an academic setting. We specifically focus on the tool's potential for educators when assessing Capstone software repositories. Our results emphasize that educators found bubble chart visualization and metrics such as ''Top Contributor'' and ''Number of Commits'' helpful in understanding group dynamics and contribution. We also discuss the tool's limitations among visual techniques and metrics used. As the educational landscape shifts towards increased virtual and remote modalities, tools like Git-Truck are poised to augment the intricacy and depth of software project evaluations. For those considering adopting or adapting such tools in similar contexts, our study offers the challenges and lessons learned from this experience.

StandUp Reports play an important role in capstone software engineering courses, facilitating progress tracking, obstacle identification, and team collaboration. However, despite their significance, students often grapple with the challenge of creating StandUp Reports that are clear, concise, and actionable. This paper investigates the impact of the use of generative AI in producing StandUp report recommendations, aiming to assist students in enhancing the quality and effectiveness of their reports. In a semester-long capstone course, 179 students participated in 16 real-world software development projects. They submitted weekly StandUp Reports with the assistance of an AI-powered Slack, which analyzed their initial reports and provided suggestions for enhancing them using both GPT-3.5 and the early access GPT-4 API. After each submitted report, students voluntarily answered a survey about usability and suggestion preference. Furthermore, we conducted a linguistic analysis of the recommendations made by the algorithms to gauge reading ease and comprehension complexity. Our findings indicate that the AI-based recommendation system helped students improve the overall quality of their StandUp Reports throughout the semester. Students expressed a high level of satisfaction with the tool and exhibited a strong willingness to continue using it in the future. The survey reveals that students perceived a slight improvement when using GPT-4 compared to GPT-3.5. Finally, a computational linguistic analysis performed on the recommendations demonstrates that both algorithms significantly improve the alignment between the generated texts and the students' educational level, thereby improving the quality of the original texts.

Analyzing source code dependencies between components within a program is an essential activity in software development. While various software visualization tools have been proposed to aid in this activity, most are limited to desktop applications. As a result, the potential impact of augmented reality (AR) on improving dependency analysis remains largely unexplored. In this paper, we present DGT-AR, a node-link visualization tool for code dependencies in immersive augmented reality. DG T-AR extends the physical screen space of IDEs to the infinite virtual space. That is, developers neither have to sacrifice screen space nor leave the IDE and use third-party applications. We present the preliminary results of a pilot user study along with four key lessons learned. Additionally, we have made DGT-AR publicly available.

Mobile grid computing has been a popular topic for researchers due to mobile and IoT devices’ ubiquity and their evergrowing processing potential. While many scheduling algorithms for harnessing these resources exist in the literature for standard grid computing scenarios, surprisingly, there is little insight into this matter in the context of hybrid‐powered computing resources, typically found in Dew and Edge computing environments. This paper proposes new algorithms aware of devices’ power source for scheduling tasks in hybrid environments, i.e., where the battery‐ and non‐battery‐powered devices cooperate. We simulated hybrid Dew/Edge environments by extending DewSim, a simulator that models battery‐driven devices’ battery behavior using battery traces profiled from real mobile devices. We compared the throughput and job completion achieved by algorithms proposed in this paper using as a baseline a previously developed algorithm that considers computing resources but only from battery‐dependent devices called Enhanced Simple Energy‐Aware Schedule (E‐SEAS). The obtained results in the simulation reveal that our proposed algorithms can obtain up to a 90% increment in overall throughput and around 95% of completed jobs in hybrid environments compared to E‐SEAS. Finally, we show that incorporating these characteristics gives more awareness of the type of resources present and can enable the algorithms to manage resources more efficiently in more hybrid environments than other algorithms found in the literature.

Code offloading is a popular technique for extending the natural capabilities of mobile devices by migrating processor‐intensive tasks to resource‐rich surrogates. Despite multiple platforms for offloading being available in academia, these frameworks have yet to permeate the industry. One of the primary reasons for this is limited experimentation in practical settings and lack of reliability, scalability, and options for distribution. This paper introduces MobiCOP, a new code offloading framework designed from the ground up with these requirements in mind. It features a novel design fully self‐contained in a library and offers compatibility with most stock Android devices available today. Compared to local task executions, MobiCOP offers performance improvements of up to 17x and increased battery efficiency of up to 25x, shows minimum performance degradation in environments with unstable networks, and features an autoscaling module that allows its server counterpart to scale to an arbitrary number of offloading requests. It is compatible with the most relevant Android technologies optimized for heavy computation (NDK and Renderscript) and has so far been well received by fellow mobile developers. We hope MobiCOP will help bring mobile code offloading closer to the industry realm.

In recent years, institutions of higher education have been using Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) as an alternative to enhance and innovate traditional classroom practices. One of the approaches to this type of innovation consists of using MOOC platforms to develop online courses exclusively for their students. They are known as SPOC (Small Private Online Courses), distance-learning courses that provide access to knowledge online to smaller groups of students with a well defined profile. However, despite being robust platforms that support large volumes of data and visits, these are limited in the development of certain traditional class activities. Specifically, the existing platforms lack tools to facilitate group work. To address this problem, this article presents MyMOOCSpace, a game-based mobile application that offers an opportunity to scaffold the collaborative learning processes of MOOC platforms. MyMOOCSpace was developed with CSCL and game dynamics in mind. To assess this application and demonstrate its use, a case study of 25 students is presented. The results show that MyMOOCSpace increases the interaction among groups of SPOC participants.

Project-based courses can provide valuable learning experiences for computing majors as well as for faculty and community partners. However, proper coordination between students, stakeholders and the academic team is very difficult to achieve. We present an integral study consisting of a twofold approach. First, we propose a proven capstone course framework implementation in conjunction with an educational software tool to support and ensure proper fulfillment of most academic and engineering needs. Second, we propose an approach for mining process data from the information generated by this tool as a way of understanding these courses and improving software engineering education. Moreover, we propose visualizations, metrics and algorithms using Process Mining to provide an insight into practices and procedures followed during various phases of a software development life cycle. We mine the event logs produced by the educational software tool and derive aspects such as cooperative behaviors in a team, component and student entropy, process compliance and verification. The proposed visualizations and metrics (learning analytics) provide a multi-faceted view to the academic team serving as a tool for feedback on development process and quality by students

Chronic respiratory diseases are one of the most prevalent health problems in the world. Treatment for these kind of afflictions often take place at home, where the continuous care of a medical specialist is frequently beyond the economical means of the patient, therefore having to rely on informal caregivers (family, friends, etc.). Unfortunately, these treatments require a deep involvement on their part, which results in a heavy burden on the caregivers' routine and usually end up deteriorating their quality of life. In recent years, mHealth and eHealth applications have gained a wide interest in academia due to new capabilities enabled by the latest advancements in mobile technologies and wireless communication infrastructure. These innovations have resulted in several applications that have successfully managed to improve automatic patient monitoring and treatment and to bridge the distance between patients, caregivers and medical specialists. We therefore seek to move this trend forward by now pushing these capabilities into the field of respiratory therapies in order to assist patients with chronic respiratory diseases with their treatment, and to improve both their own and their caregivers' quality of life. This paper presents a cloud-based mobile system to support and improve homecare for respiratory diseases. The platform described uses vital signs monitoring as a way of sharing data between hospitals, caregivers and patients. Using an iterative research approach and the user's direct feedback, we show how mobile technologies can improve a respiratory therapy and a family's quality of life.

One of the weakest points of scientific research is the loss of data. A tiny fraction of the information generated onsite is published or released to public knowledge, and many useful studies end up stored in papers or emails without being utilized. Live ANDES is a mobile-cloud shared workspace designed to address this problem, promoting citizen science, data collection and analysis for wildlife conservation. It works by gathering geo-localized data provided by the scientific community, amateur naturalists, park rangers and people at large through web and mobile applications. Live ANDES offers filters, visualization and download options to work with existing data. Researchers can use this new information to identify species, ranges of distribution, and detect key habitat factors and potential threats to their conservation. Live ANDES is implemented using the Backend as a Service pattern on Microsoft Azure to manage the processing of the large amounts of data generated from sightings. It includes an API for mobile and desktop clients hosted in an Azure Virtual Machine, cloud storage and connection with external services to complement the existing information about recorded sightings. This paper discusses Live ANDES software design, architecture and a study case, in order to demonstrate an actual application of data management in the cloud and its impact on conservation.

Software Engineering is an important area within industry and academia. Empirical software engineering has grown in importance in the software engineering research and education community. This means that it has become very relevant to include empirical studies or practices into computer science and software engineering curricula. This paper shows the results of applying an empirical approach to teaching software engineering through real-life projects. The computer science capstone experience is designed to bridge the gap from university expectations to those of industry.

The flexibility and changing nature of loosely coupled work makes presence awareness crucial to promote interactions among collaborators. Undergraduate students, in their efforts to accomplish coursework-related tasks, must deal with having several available channels to interact with others, accessing and sharing educational material, and the need to optimize their time. Most of them work in a loosely coupled way as the main strategy to reduce the effort spent in the educational process. Presence awareness may help them achieve interactions among potential collaborators in this scenario. This paper aims to identify the most suitable presence awareness information to promote on-demand interactions among college students. A study was conducted for this purpose, involving undergraduate engineering students from two universities in Chile. This article also presents a classification of presence awareness mechanisms for loosely-coupled mobile group work.

One of the problems affecting fire departments in Latin America is the lack of a strong infrastructure to overcome their communication problems. Because these organizations are mainly volunteer and receive minimal support from government agencies, most existing solutions are not applicable for them. This article presents a low-cost mobile groupware application, which may be used in emergency situations to overcome the firefighters' communication problems. The tool, named MobileMap, allows exchanging textual and graphical information using mobile devices. Therefore, this solution complements the frequently over-used radio communication systems. This tool was evaluated in a simulated and a real scenario; the obtained results are highly encouraging.

Traditionally, collaborative systems have been difficult to conceive, design and implement. Although several requirements involved in these products are recurrent, some become invisible to clients and developers because they are part of the product back- end. This situation is worse in the case of mobile groupware because the general requirements to support mobile collaboration are still unclear. This paper presents a framework of general requirements that are usually present in mobile shared workspaces. These requirements are not always visible; therefore the framework acts as a checklist helping developers to consider them. Thus, the framework could increase the success probability of mobile shared workspaces.

Wireless communication and mobile computing technologies have brought new opportunities and challenges to the CSCW area. Traditional CSCW solutions concerning communication and coordination support are not applicable to mobile collaboration scenarios. Therefore, new reusable solutions have to be proposed in order to ease the development of mobile collaborative applications. This paper presents a set of design patterns to support communication and coordination in mobile ad-hoc scenarios. These two aspects are the basis to support mobile collaboration.

Workflow modeling is well suited for scenarios where many entities work collaboratively towards a common goal, and it is vastly used to model complex business processes. Besides, the workflow model can be applied to a wide variety of domains. This paper shows how to use workflows to model collaboration in ad-hoc mobile environments. Particularly, it introduces the concept of "active entity", which is a network-isolated subcomponent of a workflow process. It is shown how active entities overcome the challenges of an ad-hoc mobile environment. The support required for this workflow extension in terms of lightweight software architecture for mobile device is also described.