Agile methodologies like Scrum are vital in software engineering (SE) education but can be complex for students. Especially, planning backlog items during a sprint turns out to be challenging. Our research develops and assesses a web-based educational tool, ScrumQuest, aimed at aiding first-year SE students in mastering Scrum practices with an emphasis on effective planning. Addressing a previous gap in Scrum educational tools, ScrumQuest also includes a unique and novel feature that provides automated feedback on sprint backlog activities to enhance student guidance. Evaluation involving 21 first-year SE university students indicated a positive experience with ScrumQuest, highlighting enhanced engagement and improved usage of sprint backlogs. Students found ScrumQuest easier to use than GitHub Projects, which served as a baseline in the study. In addition to developing and evaluating a novel Scrum educational tool, we contribute to design-science research by providing validated functional requirements within this context. We explain our research and demonstrate ScrumQuest's practical relevance in Software Engineering education.

The rapid growth of online education, propelled by the COVID-19 pandemic, highlights the importance of ensuring fairness in assessments. Existing research explores software solutions and security concerns in online proctoring, where specialized software monitors digital assessments remotely. However, there remains a gap in research concerning specific security requirements. Our research aims to bridge this gap by identifying essential security requirements for robust online proctoring. Using three research methods—threat analysis, examination of university documents, and inspection of major proctoring software—we distill five pivotal security requirements for higher education related to student authentication, verification of work authenticity, prevention of prior access to exam materials, the protection of students' personal data, and availability of the exam. This study serves as a guide for educational institutions seeking or adapting proctoring systems as well as software development entities specializing in proctoring systems. By delineating these security requirements, we provide foundational support to strengthen online education while upholding academic integrity.

Attribute-based encryption (ABE) is a popular type of public-key encryption that enforces access control cryptographically, and has spurred the proposal of many use cases. To satisfy the requirements of the setting, tailor-made schemes are often introduced. However, designing secure schemes---as well as verifying that they are secure---is notoriously hard. Several of these schemes have turned out to be broken, making them dangerous to deploy in practice.

Abstract Attribute-based encryption (ABE) cryptographically implements fine-grained access control on data. As such, data can be stored by an entity that is not necessarily trusted to enforce access control, or an entity that is not even trusted to have access to the plaintext data at all. Instead, access control can be externally enforced by a trusted entity. Additionally, some multi-authority variants of ABE—which do not have a central authority—can effectively and securely implement access control in multiple-domain settings. Furthermore, ABE is the only cryptographic approach to fine-grained access control that does not require an online trusted third party during access requests, and thus provides better availability properties. The actual realization of these theoretical advantages in practice depends on whether current state-of-the-art ABE schemes support the necessary core properties. Much progress has been made in the last two decades in pairing-based ABE schemes, owing to their versatility and efficiency. In fact, it is possible to support most core properties under strong security guarantees, while incurring acceptable storage and computational costs. It is therefore a good time to ask ourselves whether pairing-based ABE has reached its full practical potential. To answer this question, we provide a comprehensive systematized overview of various existing pairing-based ABE schemes and their core properties. We also investigate the relationship between these core properties and real-world access control requirements. We show that a few challenges remain, that must be overcome for ABE to reach its full potential as a mechanism to implement efficient and secure access control in practice.

Software Engineering and Computer Science (CS) programs often contain several mathematical courses or courses with large mathematics components or dependencies. Study success in those subjects can be influenced by students’ attitudes towards mathematics and their perceptions about their own relation with mathematics. To gain insights into how the mathematics perceptions of computer science students affect their studies, we collected qualitative data from fourteen CS students from two universities in the context of an elective mathematics course. In this qualitative research, we used a triangulation strategy by collecting data from three different sources (interviews, questionnaires, and math-history assignments) to develop a comprehensive understanding of CS students’ mathematics perceptions. The thematic analysis revealed the factors that affect students’ perceptions about mathematics, including various types of prior experiences, their self-efficacy, math anxiety, and motivation sources. The analysis also highlighted that students find mathematics important for skill transfer to specific CS topics and for supporting continuous learning.

Unit testing is an essential part of computer science education. Students leaving the university should be able to test at a high quality. Traditionally, teaching assistants or teachers themselves check projects and assignments manually. Clearly, this does not scale well. Furthermore, such methods are not suitable to easily get an overview of the overall student performance. A more efficient approach is the so-called all-pairs method, applied by the study of Edwards and Shams (ITiCSE, 2014). Each student implements both the unit (e.g. a class) and a corresponding test suite. Additionally, the teacher creates a reference implementation. The measurement is done by running all tests against all implementations. The present study builds on that research.