In software engineering education, continuous evaluation of student progress and project outcomes plays a vital role in improving student performance and course design. This paper presents the development and application of the “Education Intelligence (EI)” system, combining mining software repositories (MSR) techniques with data visualization and advanced analytical capabilities. Designed for software engineering courses, based on previous research and expert input, the developed dashboard provides visual analytics to track student engagement, repository contributions, and project management activities over time. Being deployed within the course of three academic years (2020-2023) at a large European university, detailed comparisons have been possible, contributing to a more refined and responsive educational approach. Findings revealed significant variations in performance and unexpected time commitments, uncovering previously unnoticed issues. The knowledge gained was then used to reduce time demands, distribute work more equally, and finally improve student outcomes. By integrating MSR and visual analytics, this paper highlights how EI contributes to a more adaptive, data-driven approach toward enhancing both student learning experiences and the overall quality of software engineering courses.

Mental health has become an important topic in recent years and can be considered a risk factor for contracting so-called non-communicable diseases (NCDs). These diseases, especially cardiovascular diseases, cancers, chronic respiratory diseases, and diabetes, are not spread through infection or other people but are caused by unhealthy behaviors. This work focuses on mental health for university students. Studies have shown that this target group can be particularly susceptible to stress and stress-related symptoms because they have to deal with academic pressure, separation respectively, individuation from their families, work, and tight financial situations. Therefore, the authors of this work propose “MoodBooster,” an application to support stress management for university students. It includes features like tracking stressful events, educational content, and several mini-serious games, two of which were prototypically implemented to help with stress reduction. Serious Games are games that also serve purposes other than pure entertainment and are successful with behavior change in their users. The prototype was evaluated within the target group, and the feedback was mostly positive. Players especially found the included serious games helpful for stress reduction, entertaining, and easy to grasp.

Vaccinations are among the most effective tools for disease prevention. Unfortunately, in recent years, many have neglected the substantial benefits of immunization, putting them at higher risk of getting a severe course. This is also particularly important for higher-risk groups, such as children or immuno-compromised individuals. One contributing factor to the decline in vaccination rates is the lack of awareness and education about immunization. The limited sources of information, such as vaccination centers and pharmacies, are generally only utilized by those already interested in the topic. Within that area, health and vaccination literacy plays a huge part. Health literacy involves understanding and using health-related information to make informed decisions about healthcare and health promotion. Vaccine literacy encompasses individuals' knowledge, motivation, and competence to comprehend and apply vaccine information. Additional motivational sources are needed to address this issue and engage a broader audience. This research introduces the development of a serious game aimed at increasing awareness and interest in immunization. The design and requirement analysis was supported by conducting multiple expert interviews and involving evaluation participants. Seven pharmacists and 24 users were included throughout five phases, resulting in 37 identified requirements. This approach seeks to enhance public understanding and participation in immunization through an interactive and educational platform.

Due to the COVID pandemic more and more people suffer from mid-to long-term problems associated with it. COVID can also cause a wide range of health issues over a longer period of time, which has been called Long COVID. Due to the wide range of symptoms and the fact that Long COVID is relatively new, there is a lack of applications supporting Long COVID patients. In this paper, a newly developed solution of a Long COVID patient support application is being discussed. It is based on the previous identification of requirements from questionnaires of patients with Long COVID, where they expressed their needs and wishes for such a solution with additional identified ones. This paper focuses on designing and developing an application containing the respective derived requirements to help and support people suffering from Long COVID.

Delivering high quality code is a critical success factor for any software project. Thus the teaching of proper software quality assurance skills presents an important objective for educational institutions. We conducted a single-case study in a student project environment to evaluate the improvement of the quality assurance process by measures of continuous feedback and elements of gamification and also have students gain experience with these measures in an industrial-like setup. Based on our data analysis, results suggest that the software quality and also learning experience can both be improved by our proposed measures. Moreover, key findings include that gamification can serve as a strong motivational driver to developers to deal with software quality issues and also facilitate knowledge transfer, but also that sufficient effort needs to be put into balancing the reward system to achieve a long-lasting effect.

Software portfolios of today’s companies are comprised of a variety of heterogeneous, modular, and often polyglot software solutions. Ensuring high-quality standards across these entire portfolios raises additional challenges for quality engineers and requires new strategies and visualization approaches to support software quality management decisions. In this paper, we study the information needs of software quality engineers that drive these decisions on portfolio-level and propose Portfoliotrix -an expert visualization prototype for a portfolio-wide analysis and comparison of software quality metric trends. For this, we first introduce our four-phase fully automated data-mining process for gathering and aggregating quality metric data from the underlying software repositories. We then present our application frontend that implements different visualization and filtering concepts to satisfy eight specific information needs derived from our prior qualitative semi-structured expert interviews. A final scenario-based expert evaluation confirms the practical relevance of our prototype. Experts took less time to complete quality-related management tasks with our tool than they had estimated when relying only upon existing toolsets. Moreover, our visualization system reached the System Usability Scale (SUS) score of "good" with 76.7 points.

Universities-Industry Collaboration (UIC) is recognized as being used as a vehicle aiming to produce positive impacts towards real-life issues, research and the quality of education. Although extensive research has been carried out on UIC, a lack of market-oriented research projects towards software industry has remained unclear in emerging countries. Hence, this study has a twofold purpose: firstly, it summarizes current efforts regarding the use of software in Mozambique and, secondly, based on said analysis it proposes a mechanism as a means to accelerate collaborations between academics and industry partners to raise the quality of education. The data were mainly collected through semi-structured interviews targeted at participants from two groups of companies: IT and non-IT companies. Based on the findings, most companies use Java, Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP), and C# as the primary programming languages and the use of proprietary database management systems prevail over open-source in both companies. A minor number of companies also develop in-house software. Key findings include lack of necessary skills matching to labor market needs, predominance of foreign software packages usage, and lack of collaborative projects between universities and local market. The findings are of a high value to Information Technology (IT) industry professionals & practitioners, academic & research community, and other stakeholders groups in Mozambique and beyond.

Dealing with legacy systems has been a challenge for the industry for decades. The pressure to efficiently modernise legacy assets to meet new business needs and minimise associated risks is increasing. Automated code transformation, which is associated with serious (long-known) risks, is a high priority in the industrial environment due to the cost structure, the effort required and the supposed time savings. However, little has been published about the long-term effects of successful migrations. This paper looks at three different cases of automated code transformation at different stages of their lifecycle, highlights the lessons learned and derives a number of recommendations that should be useful for planning and executing future transformations.

Stroke is affecting different age groups worldwide with tremendous consequences. Most stroke survivors suffer from motor impairment, where rehabilitation helps to regain lost abilities. Rehabilitation is a long process that focuses on repeating exercises, which are monotonous and time consuming. As a consequence, patients loose interest and motivation. Serious games offer the possibility to deliver rehabilitation exercises in combination with entertaining and motivating aspects. A variety of serious games using additional hardware is available to support stroke patients. In this article, the authors propose a new and innovative serious game, which relies only on integrated sensors of a smartphone. Development was based on a user-centered design approach divided into two phases. In phase 1, requirements were identified in cooperation with a therapist and 13 stroke patients. The developed serious game included different levels of difficulty for movement, gesture, and touch exercises. Additional feedback and requirements from therapists and medical doctors were included in phase 2, which resulted in an advanced solution with additional levels. Gathered feedback showed a positive attitude toward the proposed solution.

Although the software development methodology Kanban, which refers and relates to the concepts and ideas of Lean Manufacturing originating in the Japanese automobile industry, was initially developed and used within distributed teams, correlating research is lacking, incomplete and relatively young as a field. This paper addresses the need for research in this field and investigates three specific aspects of Kanban in distributed teams: Pull System, Work In Progress Limit and the concept of Kaizen culture (continuous improvement) narrowed by the distribution, size and life cycle of the team. Our qualitative methodology is based on a case study where empirical data was collected through the use of semi-structured expert interviews. The evaluative strategy is qualitative content analysis. The results of this study show that challenges and complications result from the use of Kanban, but it is effective within distributed teams. The observed challenges are discussed in detail and we conclude with eight recommendations for practicing Kanban in a distributed team as well as indicators for future research directions.

Re-platforming - the transfer of a legacy system to a new target platform - is often seen as a first cost-reduction step to enable a long term reengineering effort of a legacy system. However, recreating a functionally equivalent ecosystem on a different platform entails significant technical and organisational challenges. This extended abstract describes challenges, their solutions as well as an important lesson learned during a re-platforming project of 40 year old PL/I and COBOL applications.

Grocery shopping is a regular necessity typically conducted in-store, with available alternatives such as online grocery shopping still not fully established yet. To address challenges experienced by shoppers in a store environment, two supporting modes were derived, implemented in a prototypical smartphone application using a minimal attention user interface and evaluated in an experimental field study. The two supporting modes consist of a novel map representation of shopping lists and a contextual proximity notification system. The evaluation results show an increase in efficiency in the process of grocery shopping, resulting in reduced shopping time, optimized shopping paths in the store, minimized dependency on external support and preservation of the shopper's cognitive effort. Acceptance of the introduced supporting modes was high which is a crucial indicator for future work.

Entering text is a fundamental part of how we interact with computing devices. The predominant form of text input on smartphones are virtual keyboards, which provide greater flexibility and customization options compared to hardware keyboards. Mobile text entry performance has been widely studied in HCI research, with most experiments being conducted in a controlled, artifical lab environment. To escape the boundaries of the lab and observe mobile text entry behaviour in a realistic and natural environment, we developed and publicly released the game Hyper Typer on Google Play Store. Hyper Typer is a serious research game for measuring mobile text entry performance and behaviour on a large scale in the real world. Publishing the game on Google Play Store resulted in a total of 2,359 valid transcribed phrases with 71,963 keystrokes. In this paper we discuss the game design of Hyper Typer, present the results collected over a time period of one year after the release of the game and reflect on the advantages, disadvantages and challenges of deploying a research game publicly.

The simultaneous use of more than two different data sources from the software engineering toolset is still uncommon in the research areas of software evolution and visualization. In our work, we address this research gap by the design and evaluation of three interactive visualizations which combine the data from the version control (VCS), the issue tracking (ITS), and the continuous integration (CI) system. After analyzing the information needs of a project team and describing the available data, we selected change impact, code ownership, and activity peaks as our visualization topics. Then, we adapted suitable visualization techniques from the literature to meet our design requirements. After implementation, we evaluated our visualizations by conducting a usability test with ten senior software engineers. On the system usability scale (SUS), our visualizations achieved the rating "good" from the participants. A scenario success rate of 88% and the qualitative user feedback has provided evidence for the benefits of visualizing combined data from the VCS, ITS, and CI system.

This report describes the challenges and experiences with the incremental migration of a BPEL to a BPMN 2.0 process engine. The transition is motivated by a strategic reorientation towards the new standard as well as end of life of the previous product. The solution reflects the preliminary steps of integrating the new platform into the existing application and support for parallel operation. This paper further describes the incrementally executed reverse engineering of process definitions and migration of instances by applying four different, tiered strategies in an economically viable way. The report concludes by detailing the lessons learned to provide additional guidance for attempts to apply the detailed approach.

Software interrelationships have an impact on the quality and evolution of software projects and are therefore important to development and maintenance. Package management and build systems result in software ecosystems that usually are syntactically and semantically incompatible with each other, although the described software can overlap. There is currently no general way for querying software interrelationships across these different ecosystems. In this paper, we present our approach to combine and consequently query information about software interrelationships across different ecosystems. We propose an ontology for the semantic modeling of the relationships as linked data. Furthermore, we introduce a temporal storage and query model to handle inconsistencies between different data sources. By providing a scalable and extensible architecture to retrieve and process data from multiple repositories, we establish a foundation for ongoing research activities. We evaluated our approach by integrating the data of several ecosystems and demonstrated its usefulness by creating tools for vulnerability notification and license violation detection.

Current research on change classification centers around automated and semi-automated approaches which are based on evaluation by either the researchers themselves or external experts. In most cases, the persons evaluating the effectiveness of the classification schemes are not the authors of the original changes and therefore can only make assumptions about the intent of the changes. To support validation of existing labeling mechanisms and to provide a training set for future approaches, we present a survey of source code changes that were labeled by their original authors. Seven developers from six different project applied three existing classification schemes from current literature to enrich their own changes with meta-information, so the intent of the changes becomes more evident. The final data set consists of 967 classified changes and is available as an SQLite database as part of the MSR data set.

This work describes the design of a smartphone-based game that aims to increase children's outdoor activity through location-based interactions. In the game, players have to physically go outside, find real trees, and interact with them using their smartphones in order to keep the game's character (a timber worm) alive. First evaluation results show that children enjoyed playing and increased their outdoor activity.

Voice over IP (VoIP) gains more and more attractiveness by large companies as well as private users. Therefore, the risk increases that VoIP systems get attacked by hackers. In order to effectively protect VoIP users from misuse, researchers use, e.g., honeynets to capture and analyze VoIP attacks occurring in the Internet. Global VoIP security threats are analyzed by studying several millions of real-world attacks collected in independent VoIP honeynet solutions with different capture mechanisms over a long period of time. Due to the validation of results from several honeynet designs we have achieved a unique, much broader view on large scale attacks. The results show similar attacker behavior, confirm previous assumptions about attacks and present new insights in large scale VoIP attacks, e.g., for toll fraud.

Code reviews are a very effective, but effortful quality assurance technique. A major problem is to read and understand source-code that was produced by someone else. With different programming styles and complex interactions, understanding the code under review is the most expensive sub-task of a code review. As with many other modern software engineering practices, code reviews may be applied as a continuous process to reduce the effort and support the concept of collective ownership. This study evaluates the effect of a continuous code review process on the understandability and collective ownership of the code base. A group of 8 subjects performed a total of 114 code reviews within 18 months in an industrial context and conducted an expert evaluation according to this research question. This study concludes that there is a clear positive effect on the understandability and collective ownership of the code base with continuous code reviews, but also limiting factors and drawbacks for complex review tasks.

The number of Voice over IP systems and the number of Session Initiation Protocol users is constantly increasing. The new Voice over IP infrastructures are connected with the traditional Public Switched Telephone Network and attacks against the phone infrastructure are becoming more imaginative. The attacks can cause financial losses, e.g., attackers steal money or incur costs for the victim. We analyze the current status of toll fraud attacks by analyzing real-world attacks collected in a Voice over IP honeynet solution. Based on the detailed data about real attacks, the creation or adaption of existing prevention mechanisms is possible in order to avoid toll fraud attacks in live environments.

This report describes the challenges and experiences with the incremental re-engineering and migration of a 40 year old airport operations system. The undocumented COBOL legacy system has to be replaced within given constraints such as limited downtime. A 3-step technical strategy is derived and successfully applied to the re-engineering task in this project. The incremental approach and resulting parallel operations of both systems are the most significant technical drivers for complexity in this environment. Furthermore, this report describes the process for planning, analyzing and designing a replacement system that is backed by strong user acceptance. The user interface design task of taking the system from VT100 to a web interface was a critical success factor, as well as live testing with actual production data and actual user interactions. Other aspects such as training and end user documentation are discussed.

This paper reports on a between-subject, comparative online study of three information visualization demonstrators that each displayed the same dataset by way of an identical scatterplot technique, yet were different in style in terms of visual and interactive embellishment. We validated stylistic adherence and integrity through a separate experiment in which a small cohort of participants assigned our three demonstrators to predefined groups of stylistic examples, after which they described the styles with their own words. From the online study, we discovered significant differences in how participants execute specific interaction operations, and the types of insights that followed from them. However, in spite of significant differences in apparent usability, enjoyability and usefulness between the style demonstrators, no variation was found on the self-reported depth, expert-rated depth, confidence or difficulty of the resulting insights. Three different methods of insight analysis have been applied, revealing how style impacts the creation of insights, ranging from higher-level pattern seeking to a more reflective and interpretative engagement with content, which is what underlies the patterns. As this study only forms the first step in determining how the impact of style in information visualization could be best evaluated, we propose several guidelines and tips on how to gather, compare and categorize insights through an online evaluation study, particularly in terms of analyzing the concise, yet wide variety of insights and observations in a trustworthy and reproducable manner.

In this paper we present results from contextual interviews and observations, which we conducted in Tanzania over a period of six weeks. In our interviews we focused on use cases and benefits that the mobile phone introduced in these areas. Specifically we were interested in the impact of mobile ICTs on social networks in general and communication with friends and family in particular. The goal of the study was to identify potential areas where ICTs could improve people's lives. Based on an analysis of the results from this study we created personas, which describe archetype mobile phone users and their respective needs and goals. The paper concludes with a number of directions for further research in this area.

Current research on historical project data is rarely touching on the subject of security related information. Learning how security is treated in projects and which parts of a software are historically security relevant or prone to security changes can enhance the security strategy of a software project. We present a mining methodology for security related changes by modifying an existing method of software repository analysis. We use the gathered security changes to find out more about the nature of security in the FreeBSD project and we try to establish a link between the identified security changes and a tracker for security issues (security advisories). We give insights how security is presented in the FreeBSD project and show how the mined data and known security problems are connected.

This paper describes the industrial experience in performing database reverse engineering on a large scale software reengineering project. The project in question deals with a highly heterogeneous in-house information system (IS) that has grown and evolved in numerous steps over the past three decades. This IS consists of a large number of loosely coupled single purpose systems with a database driven COBOL application at the centre, which has been adopted and enhanced to expose some functionality over the web. The software reengineering effort that provides the context for this paper deals with unifying these components and completely migrating the IS to an up-to-date and homogeneous platform. A database reverse engineering (DRE) process was tailored to suit the project environment consisting of almost 350 tables and 5600 columns. It aims at providing the developers of the software reengineering project with the necessary information about the more than thirty year old legacy databases to successfully perform the data migration. The application of the DRE process resulted in the development of a high-level categorization of the data model, a wiki based redocumentation structure and the essential data-access statistics.

Water is a scarce resource worldwide. Yet, we have many opportunities to conserve it. One particular opportunity for water conservation is the shower, because depending on the shower head and shower habits, an individual can save many liters of fresh water each day. Feedback proved to be an effective method to promote sustainable behavior. Therefore, in this paper we suggest to promote water conservation by providing feedback in form of an ambient display that can easily be integrated in current shower types. We built a prototype to study the potential of such a feedback device. These shower water meter (show-me) display the amount of water, that is used during one shower in form of LEDs assembled on a stick. Thus, an increasing water level is visualized. The user study revealed two groups. The subjects who considered themselves as ecologically conscious changed their behavior and turned the water down or off while soaping. Also, they are willing to pursue this behavior. Other subjects who did not have the goal to act more sustainable, were surprised about their water consumption and tried to reduce it. However, after the removal of the show-me device they did not maintain their behavior and fell back into their previous habit.

Based on the definition of the European Commission, small enterprises can be defined as companies with less than 50 employees. Medium size companies are companies with less than 250 employees. For small and medium enterprises some research in regards to ERP selection criteria has been done. But this research did not distinguish further in the different behaviors that can be found during the ERP selection process within different types of companies. Different characteristics which appear from an IT operational point of view on how small and medium size businesses organize their IT have not been taken into consideration. This paper gives the definition of a specific group of companies named ¿orchestra companies¿ within the SME band. This is done by limiting the quite broad definition of the European commission and applying an IT operational viewpoint. Further the different requirements of orchestra companies in regards to the ERP selection process are formulated. To correlate the ERP selection criteria and the different behaviors from an IT operational point of view, a segmentation of orchestra companies is developed. For each segment the focus on specific ERP selection criteria is discussed.

Maintenance of software is risky, potentially expensive - and inevitable. The main objective of this study is to examine the relationship of code change, referred to as maintenance effort, with source-level software metrics. This approach varies from the typical approach of evaluating software metrics against failure data and provides a different angle on the validation of software metrics. The goal of this study is to show through exhaustive data mining that a relation between software metrics and code change exists. Once this connection is established, a set of software metrics is identified, which will be used in further studies to predict code change in problematic modules identified by the software metrics at an early development stage.

In this paper we suggest the ceiling as a new physical surface for information visualization. To provide a design framework for application designers, we present the notion of 'information sky'. This concept is based on (1) the metaphor of the natural sky, (2) historical examples of ceiling art and (3) recent computing paradigms, including mediatecture, ubiquitous computing and ambient display. We further introduce three distinct categories that denote potential application domains for ceiling-based data visualizations. Finally, we present four different application scenarios we have developed using prototyping and user-centered design techniques, and discuss how they relate to the categories.

We report the design and evaluation of a novel game controller text entry method called TwoStick. The design is based on the review of previous work and several rounds of pilot testing. We compared user performance with TwoStick experimentally to a selection keyboard which is the de facto standard of game controller text entry. Eight participants completed 20 fifteen-minute sessions with both text entry methods. In the beginning TwoStick was slower (4.3 wpm, uncorrected error rate = 0.68%) than the selection keyboard (5.6 wpm, 0.85%). During the last session TwoStick was faster (14.9 wpm, 0.86% vs. 12.9 wpm, 0.27%). Qualitative results indicated that TwoStick was more fun and easier to use than the selection keyboard.

This poster describes the design and early evaluation of MusicPets. MusicPets allows children to store audio, such as (composed) tunes or recorded messages, on tangible containers embodied by soft toys. Results show that children enjoy creating tunes and appreciate the possibility to record them on physical objects so that they can later 'show' them to others. They would also use MusicPets for exchanging messages and playing DJ using multiple prerecorded soft toys. MusicPets not only fosters musical creativity but also promotes collaboration among children.

A vast variety of topics relate to the field of Software Engineering. Some universities implement curricula covering all aspects of Software Engineering. A number of other courses cover detailed aspects, e.g. programming, usability and security issues, analysis, architecture, design, and quality. Other universities offer general curricula considering Software Engineering in few or single course only. In each case, a course set has to be defined which directly relates to a specific student outcome. This work provides a method for categorizing and analyzing a course set within abstract dimensions for course design. We subsequently show the results of applying the dimensions to the course degree scheme in use. The course design dimensions can also be related to the student outcomes defined in SE2004 CC Section 3.2 [10].

Formal evaluation of team performance (e.g. with metrics) is a good and well known instrument for providing feedback about finished projects. If performance was behind expectations a further analysis may include an oral discussion of problems that occurred during the project, that have been treated ineffectively or even have been put aside. Such problems may include choice and quality of engineering practices, the appropriateness of role and responsibility assignments and relationships between team members, which have been conductive or obstructive to the team. This feedback improves engineering behaviour and strengthens the problem and conflict solving capabilities for coming projects, but can't affect any more the project of concern, which already has been finished. This paper proposes the usage of a questionnaire based on skills and personality traits for providing feedback to software project teams during running projects. The result of the assessment should help to improve the performance of the project team by defining roles adequately and putting responsibilities to the right people: It improves the personal relationships within the team, increases the attitude for personal tasks, increases the understanding and respect for the other team members, shows significant misconception of personal strengths and weaknesses and indicates fit or misfit of engineering practices with skills and personalities.

Project managers need timely feedback on the quality of development products to monitor and control project progress. Inspection is an effective method to identify defects and to measure product quality. Objective and subjective models can be used to estimate the total number of defects in a product based on defect data from inspection. This paper reports on a controlled experiment to evaluate the accuracy of individual subjective estimates of developers, who had just before inspected the document, on the number of defects in a software requirements specification. In the experiment most inspectors underestimated the total number of defects in the document. The number of defects reported and the number of (major) reference defects found were identified as factors that separated groups of inspectors who over- or underestimated on average.

The following paper deals with a model for reuse of software providing different levels of reuse intensity. The model is designed for industrial use based on experiences from consulting a large inhouse developer (administrative software). It is drawn from state-of-the-art suggestions in reuse research as well as from typical constraints of time and costs in a less ideal development scenario. The model can be taken as a receipt for reuse in practice as it provides three different levels of reuse intensities/investments, and thus returns three different levels of reuse maturity. A basic level of reuse maturity in practice is to achieve maintainability: Many, especially older, programs turn out to be widely undocumented; often requirements and/or abstract design are missing, the programs do not meet basic criteria of maintainability. A medium level of reuse maturity is represented by balance within similar projects: A well designed and therefore maintainable software system contains system-specific and general components. We define a group of software systems as balanced, if there is a clear top-down structure from the general to the specific in documents concerning analysis, design, code and test. A new but similar system can be designed reusing upper level components and adapting lower level ones. A top-level reuse maturity in practice affords several technical and organizational efforts. We favor the term reuse culture. The design of a new project goes along with the use of repositories for all phases of development. Making a reuse culture work needs developing, providing and enforcing of standards. On the technical level this requires the use of quality assurance methodology, on the organizational level this includes a rather precise project information flow model. The roles for a reuse culture are defined.>