A Massive Open Online Course (MOOC) is an effective way for a university to deliver course content that reaches a global audience. Such developments are not without substantial costs and risks [1]. On the Coursera platform, there are MOOC specializations, which package a sequence of related courses. Retaining learners is of particular interest to instructors as they progress through the courses of a long specialization. Learners that encounter delays, unfairness, or plagiarism in peer evaluations of assignments could become dissatisfied enough to withdraw, for example. We describe using trends in sentiment analysis of discussion forum postings across the courses. The idea is to detect, interpret, and address points of lower sentiment in a MOOC specialization, to avoid losing learners. We outline our findings with a MOOC specialization on software product management, which consists of six courses, involving a nominal 24 weeks of content [2,3]. Interestingly, higher sentiment in a course's content did not necessarily preserve enrollment numbers for the subsequent course.

In the face of an information intensive Internet, searching has become the most important way to locate information efficiently. Current searching techniques are able to retrieve relevant data, however, personalization techniques are still needed to better identify different user's requirements. This paper proposes an interactive and iterative approach to infer a user's intentions implicitly, and adapt to changing user requirements. We illustrate the approach using a personalized academic paper searching application. The system design is extensible and applicable to many search domains.

The software dependency network reflects structure and the developer contribution network reflects process. Previous studies have used social network properties over these networks to predict whether a software component is defect-prone. However, these studies do not consider the strengths of the dependencies in the networks. In our approach, we use a citation influence topic model to determine dependency strengths among components and developers, analyze weak and strong dependencies separately, and apply social network properties to predict defect-prone components. In experiments on Eclipse and NetBeans, our approach has higher accuracy than prior work.

With the growing establishment of Internet infrastructure, more and more online services become available to end user, which in turn promotes the prosperity of the Internet. However, two issues emerge during this information increase. First, users have to access many individual sites to get their services, which consumes lots of time and contains some duplicate work. Second, user traces in different websites could have been used to provide more personalized services. Given these observations, this position paper proposes a recommendation-assisted personal web system based on existing work on personal web and recommendation systems. This system can integrate several web services to form a personal web, derive request-specific user data, and provide a personalized service by content based filtering and user intention inference. Using a research assistant application as a case study, we show how this framework helps to deliver personalized services.

Building software from source is often viewed as a “solved problem” by software engineers, as there are many mature, well-known tools and techniques. However, anecdotal evidence suggests that these tools often do not effectively address the complexities of building multilanguage software. To investigate this apparent problem, we have performed a qualitative study on a set of five multilanguage open source software packages. Surprisingly, we found build system problems that prevented us from building many of these packages out-of-the-box. Our key finding is that there are commonalities among build problems that can be systematically addressed. In this paper, we describe the results of this exploratory study, identify a set of common build patterns and anti-patterns, and outline research directions for improving the build process. One such finding is that multilanguage packages avoid certain build problems by supporting compilation-free extension. As well, we find evidence that concerns from the application and implementation domains may “leak” into the build model, with both positive and negative effects on the resulting build systems.

Android is an operating system designed specifically for mobile devices. It has a layered architecture. In this paper, we extract Android's concrete layered architecture by analyzing the build dependency relation between Android sub-projects and use it to validate the proposed conceptual architecture. Our experiment shows that Android's concrete architecture conforms to the conceptual architecture. Apart from that, we also show the extracted architecture can help developers and users better understand the Android system and further demonstrate its potential benefits in studying the impact of changes.

Software diagnosis in enterprise systems is an expensive, largely manual process. It significantly contributes to the increasing costs in IT management, because it takes time and expertise for system administrators to notice an anomalous state due to the information overload generated by the many components in such systems. In this paper, we propose an unsupervised approach for anomaly detection using the monitored application's run-time behaviors. These behaviors, represented by the state of the file system and how files are accessed when the system is running normally, serve as a baseline. An alert is generated when behaviors that significantly deviate from the baseline appear, and a starting point of investigation is provided to assist the human operators in understanding the context of the problem.

The process of manually diagnosing a software misconfiguration problem is time consuming. Manually writing and updating rules to detect future problems is still the state of the practice. Consequently, there is a need for increased automation. In this paper, we propose a three-phase framework using machine learning techniques for automated configuration faults diagnosis. This system can also help in capturing expert knowledge of configuration troubleshooting. Our experiments on Apache web server configurations are generally encouraging and non-experts can use this system to diagnose misconfigurations effectively.

This paper reports on the activities and results from the 3rd International Symposium on Software Engineering Course Projects (SWECP 2006), which was held on October 19, 2006 in Toronto, Canada as part of the IBM CASCON 2006 conference. The symposium explored how educators, students, and industry can work together to develop a more rewarding educational experience for all stakeholders involved in the context of senior design classes and team-based course projects. Several key topics were discussed at the symposium, including team dynamics, the choice of software development process, and the role of advanced software engineering tools in design project courses. SWECP 2006 was a sequel to the workshops that were held in 2002 and 2005.

This paper reports on the activities and results from the 2nd International Workshop on Software Engineering Course Projects (SWECP 2005), which was held on October 18, 2005 in Toronto, Canada. Creating software engineering course projects for undergraduate students is a challenging task. The instructor must carefully balance the conflicting goals of academic rigor and industrial relevance. Some of the fundamental characteristics of software engineering projects (e.g., team-based, large-scale, long-lived) are difficult to realize within the constraints of a university course in a single semester. This is particularly true when dealing with young students who may lack the real-world experience needed to appreciate some of the more subtle aspects of software engineering. This workshop explored how educators and industry can work together to develop a more rewarding educational experience for all stakeholders involved. Several key themes emerged from the workshop, including the importance of forming teams that are fair and balanced, the challenges in selecting a project that engages the students and meets the goals of the course, and the need for knowledge transfer amongst instructors.

During the last decade, the number of software applications that have been deployed as a collection of components implemented in different programming languages and paradigms has increased considerably. When such applications are maintained, traditional program comprehension and reengineering techniques may not be adequate. In this context, this working session aims to stimulate discussion around key issues relating to the comprehension, reengineering, and maintenance of multi-language software applications. Such issues include, but are not limited to, the formalization, management, exploration, and presentation of multi-language program dependencies, as well as the development of practical toolsets for automating and easing the comprehension and maintenance of multi-language software.

Software systems are often written in more than one programming language. During development, programmers need to understand not only the dependencies among code in a particular language, but dependencies that span languages. In this paper, we focus on the problem of scripting languages (such as Perl) and their extension mechanisms to calling functions with a C interface. Our general approach involves building a fact extractor for each scripting language, by hooking into the language interpreter itself. The produced facts conform to a common schema, and an analyzer is extended to recognize the cross-language dependencies. We present how these statically discovered dependencies can be represented, visualized, and explored in the Eclipse environment

Understanding software engineering issues for autonomic computing systems is critical for the software and information technology sectors, which are continually challenged to reduce the complexity of their systems. To be autonomic, a system must know itself as well as its boundaries and its environment, configure and reconfigure itself, continually optimize itself, recover or heal from malfunction, protect itself, and function in a heterogeneous world-while keeping its complexity hidden from the user. The goal of this workshop is to bring together researchers and practitioners, who investigate concepts, methodologies, techniques, technologies, and tools to design and evolve autonomic software.

Abstract This paper provides a balanced perspective of the business value and technical challenges of adopting Web services. Technology adoption is a continual challenge for both tool developers and enterprise users. Web services are a prime example of an emerging technology that is fraught with adoption issues. Part of the problem is separating marketing hype from business reality. Web services are network‐accessible interfaces to application functionality. They are built using Internet technologies such as XML and standard protocols such as SOAP. The adoption issues related to Web services are complex and multifaceted. For example, determining whether this technology is a fundamental advance, rather than something old under a new name, requires technical depth, business acumen, and considerable historical knowledge of past developments. A sample problem from the health care industry is used to illustrate some of the adoption issues. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The key objective of this workshop is to explore innovative approaches to the adoption of software engineering tools and practices-in particular by embedding them in extensions of Commercial Off-The-Shelf (COTS) software products and/or middleware technologies. The workshop aims to advance the understanding and evaluation of adoption of software engineering tools and practices by bringing together researchers and practitioners who investigate novel solutions to software engineering adoption issues.

No abstract available.

There are two basic approaches to migrating a particular subsystem: reengineering and wrapping. The author considers coarse-grained object wrapping. In wrapping, the original subsystem is essentially integrated into the new setting using infrastructure technologies. Legacy systems that have evolved over many years are notoriously difficult to decompose. Wrapping is most effective if the legacy system can be decomposed into a few large chunks where the number of communication paths among subsystems is minimized. The author discusses the use of infrastructure technology such as CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture)

Program understanding can be enhanced using reverse engineering technologies. The understanding process is heavily dependent on both individuals and their specific cognitive abilities, and on the set of facilities provided by the program understanding environment. Unfortunately, most reverse engineering tools provide a fixed palette of extraction, selection, and organization techniques. This paper describes a programmable approach to reverse engineering. The approach uses a scripting language that enables users to write their own routines for common reverse engineering activities, such as graph layout, metrics, and subsystem decomposition, thereby extending the capabilities of the reverse engineering toolset to better suit their needs. A programmable environment supported by this approach subsumes existing reverse engineering systems by being able to simulate facets of each one.

A user programmable approach to reverse engineering is described. The approach uses a scripting language that enables users to write their own routines for these activities, making the system domain-retargetable. The environment supported by this programmable approach subsumes existing reverse engineering systems by being able to simulate facets of each one and provides a smooth transition from semi-automatic to automatic reverse engineering.>