Abstract The increasing adoption of hybrid and remote work has reshaped how software teams communicate, collaborate, and make design decisions. Our prior study showed that hybrid setups often result in missed discussions, fragmented understanding, and limited documentation of design rationale. At the same time, Generative AI (GenAI) tools–such as GitHub Copilot and ChatGPT–are becoming embedded in development workflows, providing support in code generation. While GenAI’s role in software development is gaining attention, its impact on early-stage design ideation activities and collaboration in hybrid teams remains underexplored. This paper builds on earlier findings to propose a forward-looking vision of GenAI as an instant, readily available co-developer in hybrid software design. We revisit documented challenges from our earlier study on hybrid collaboration and outline how GenAI could address these issues by facilitating asynchronous participation, surfacing undocumented rationale, and preserving design continuity. We present a conceptual framing of GenAI-supported collaboration and propose a research agenda to guide future studies on integrating GenAI into hybrid settings.

Smart villages require the involvement of residents. However, past experiences have revealed that goals were often not achieved because the community was treated as a single entity. In particular, the literature highlights the importance of improving smart services and outcomes to meet the needs of children, who are often excluded from participatory initiatives and rarely recognized as stakeholders. Non-conventional learning environments, like science festivals, provide an excellent opportunity to raise awareness and engage children as stakeholders in smart villages. However, organizing these events can be challenging due to the diverse backgrounds and varying needs of participants. Moreover, organizers often lack familiarity with individuals' learning styles and requirements. This study presents an interactive, unplugged activity aimed at children aged 6 to 10, where they can devise solutions for smart villages while learning fundamental programming concepts. To illustrate the potential of this activity, we present the results of its initial implementation with approximately 100 participants during a science festival. The first results show that the proposed activity is effective, engaging, and inclusive, making it an effective method for managing large and diverse groups of participants at science festivals. Copyright © 2025 by SCITEPRESS - Science and Technology Publications, Lda.

Smart villages have transformed rural areas by using innovative solutions to provide improved public services. However, citizens often struggle to access these services due to a lack of digital skills. To address this issue, we present DigiVillage Chronicles, a serious game designed for young adults aged 18 to 35 to enhance their digital skills to access public services in smart villages. The game is set in a fictional smart village where the player participates in digital activities related to public services and gains insight into navigating the platforms offering these services in real life. The activities include browsing and applying for jobs, transferring money online, and booking a doctor’s appointment. In this paper, we present a proof of concept for the game and evaluate its quality using criteria related to both the serious and game components, as well as the balance between these elements.

Background: Organizing a high-quality coding camp, whether online or hybrid, presents a unique set of challenges, including (but not limited to) logistics, effective invitation strategies, and staffing. Aims: The OSCAR project aims to address these issues by taking a holistic approach that will lead to the creation of a comprehensive handbook and a supporting platform. Method: Three coding camps will be organized as use cases for testing the handbook and platform. Results: The first releases of the platform and handbook are ready for experimentation in the first use case, which is scheduled for September 2025. Conclusions: This paper presents the relevant results obtained so far and highlights the challenges that are of interest to the ESEM community, such as assessing participants' learning based on a combination of metrics tailored to the development process and the final software products.

Coding camps bring together individuals from diverse backgrounds to tackle given challenges within a limited timeframe. Such camps create a rich learning environment for various skills, some of which are directly associated with the camp, and some of which are a result of working as a team during the camp. Unfortunately, coding camps often remain isolated from the broader educational curriculum or other bigger context, which downplays the opportunities they can offer to students. In this paper, we present the vision of the European initiative OSCAR, which aims at connecting coding camps to the educational and professional context faced by the learners. In addition, we sketch a supporting platform and its features for connected coding camps.

Non-conventional learning experiences (e.g., hackathons and coding camps) are increasingly popular to broaden participation in computing. It is relevant to analyze the profile of participants of non-conventional learning experiences to outline better whether they efficiently attract profiles that can enrich future professional profiles in Computer Science (CS) with an inclusive and diverse approach. Picking up from that need, this paper attempts to shed light and better understand the original attitudes toward CS that participants display upon joining an informal CS-relevant educational activity. To this end, we analyze, as a compelling case, the participants’ attitudes of two coding camps carried out recently. This analysis permits us to discuss what type of students are attracted by these events, provide a more detailed analysis of the participants’ profiles, and better understand whether informal educational events effectively thrive diversity in science. The compelling case presented in this paper promotes discussion and raises questions for future research.

Vertical alignment delivers a smooth, organized curriculum. We explored an approach to apply Learning by Teaching (LbT) to support the alignment of the educational robotics curriculum and, in turn, strengthen the connections among different age groups to foster digital and social inclusion. We applied LbT in the context of teaching an introductory course in robotics in a high school, and we summarized our experience in a report that analyzes two relevant aspects: a) Understanding whether LbT supports teaching-students in learning robotics concepts and b) outlining the effectiveness of LbT for interactive activities targeting younger children during Science Festival. The observations reported in this work show that teaching-students are a relevant support for actual instructors; moreover, their activity offers several advantages, including enhanced engagement and active participation, which contribute to improved comprehension and knowledge transfer.

This research full paper presents findings on whether different hybrid work configurations during coding camps result in equal quality prod-ucts.- Background: Hybrid work has become the new normal way of working for many professionals, including software developers - some work from home, others from their office, and others from a combination of both. Thus, educating people on hybrid work is crucial. However, there is a lack of evidence and guidance to support educators in organizing hybrid non-conventional learning experiences, such as coding camps and hackathons. Research question: How do different hybrid work configurations impact the final product teams develop during coding camps for upper secondary school students? Methodology: We organized a hybrid coding camp at our university to teach upper secondary school students (aged 15–19) Agile-based Software Engineering practices and enhance their ability to develop high-quality software. The 180 participants (75% M; 25% F) had diverse backgrounds and little or no previous software development experience. The camp lasted 20 hours and integrated components from two baseline camps (onsite and on-line). We randomly assigned the 60 teams to two groups following different hybrid work configurations and compared the mobile apps they developed. Moreover, we compared all the apps of the hybrid coding camp to those of the baseline camps. Findings: The quality of the hybrid, onsite, and online coding is similar. The products of the two hybrid work configurations have similar quality. One configuration places slightly more emphasis on the User Interface, whereas the other concentrates slightly more on programming logic. This work has direct implications for educators, who can use both configurations without affecting the overall quality of the product.

Background: Global Software Engineering (GSE) extends geographical, temporal, and cultural boundaries in distributed environments. Over the past two decades, GSE research has evolved to manage software development for distributed teams. The COVID-19 pandemic highlights the need for comprehensive research, particularly during the software design phase, to support team collaboration in distributed development. Aim: This study systematically analyzes the evolution of research emphasis in the GSE field, specifically exploring on whether the research focuses increasing on software design due to the global pandemic. Method: We systematically analyzed the existing literature in two phases. In the first phase of our study, we mapped GSE research over the two decades leading to the pandemic (2000–2020). In the second phase, we used the forward snowballing approach to examine the literature on the software design phase published between 2020 and 2022. Results: The analysis of 592 research studies in the two phases reveals various trends in GSE research. Evaluation research is the most explored research type in methods and processes, and human aspects of development. Despite the paradigm shift caused by the COVID-19 pandemic that increased reliance on distributed teams, results show that while software organizations are extensively studied across all software engineering phases, the software design phase remains one of the least explored areas. Conclusion: This work highlights the evolving GSE research trends, emphasizing the rising significance of collaborative software design in distributed settings. Our findings address current research gaps and underscore the need for further research on software design activities. This contribution envisions a more collaborative, adaptable GSE field, guiding future research to support distributed teams.

While entering the post-COVID-19 pandemic phase, to define a new normal way of working, some companies are transitioning toward a permanent WFX model, while others are combining WFX with colocated work (i.e., hybrid work). Therefore, fostering WFX skills (usually classified as soft skills) in early-career students becomes crucial; additionally, it can help reduce early school leaving. This work aims at understanding how business simulation projects foster the WFX skills deemed crucial by industries. To this end, we conducted two case studies involving high school students. The final questionnaire revealed that most participants evaluate their WFX as fair or higher. Moreover, they believe that business simulation projects help in developing WFX skills. Based on our results, we highlight recommendations for educational practice.

Background. Global Software Engineering (GSE) poses several challenges during the software design process. While the existing literature provides practices and guidelines to improve architecture knowledge management in GSE-based software organizations, the challenges related to organizing collaboration during the software design process still need attention. Aim. This study aims to identify the collaboration challenges faced by distributed teams during the software design process and provide recommendations. Method. We conducted semi-structured interviews with eight professionals working in different GSE-based organizations. Results. The study revealed three challenges that underscore the negative impact of the distributed setting on team collaboration during the software design process. Conclusion. We provide recommendations and propose future research direction to enhance team collaboration in the software design process for GSE-based organizations.

In a project partially supported by research grant PANN20_00690 to Italy's CINI National Lab "Informatica e Scuola", we compared the effectiveness of two alternative instructional methods applied to scaffold the learning of iterations for children at grades 2-3. Eight university groups across the Country collaboratively run the project in two successive rounds throughout the year 2022. Teachers' feedback collected across the two rounds helped fine-tune the deployment of the interventions. The experiment results show that the two alternative interventions have measurable outcome differences in the short term.

Background. Global Software Engineering (GSE) education is an established practice in academia. Several methods and tools support communication and programming activities, but earlier development stages, such as software design and modeling practices, are less explored. Aim. The goal of this work is to analyze the learners’ perspective during an online Software Engineering course. In particular, we focus on planning/organization activities and socio-technical challenges during the software design and modeling process. Method. We used a mixed-method approach to collect data from 30 undergraduate students enrolled in an online Software Engineering course. We combined questionnaires and interviews to analyze four GSE elements (i.e., communication practices, team collaboration, task allocation and distribution, and usage of collaboration tools). Moreover, we analyzed the socio-technical challenges faced by the teams. Results. Brainstorming is the most common practice used for planning so (...).

The world of work-from-home (WFH) and work-from-anywhere (abbreviated WFX or WFA) grew more than ever during the COVID-19 pandemic. Many companies are now planning on permanently allowing WFX, with subsequent demand for specific skills. It is crucial to foster these skills in high schools, as students may enter the job market without attending University. Up-to-date analysis of the current situation is missing to align supply and demand by enabling educators to set goals and strategies to train students so that they will be able to mesh into a WFX setting. To address this issue, we collected complementary data using a case study (23 students), a questionnaire (616 students), and interviews with professionals and practitioners of the software development sector. Results suggest that information management, communication skills, autonomy, and resourcefulness are key competencies that enable professionals to succeed in a WFX environment. However, students feel less prepared in terms of communication skills; moreover, they lack time management and autonomy skills. Based on our results, we highlight recommendations for educational practice that educators can use in curriculum building to fill the gaps that emerged in this study to assure the effective development of the skillset demanded by current and future WFX conditions.

LEGO ® SERIOUS PLAY ® (LSP) is an effective methodology to enable the representation of abstract concepts and has been applied to teach several Software Engineering topics.However, there is limited evidence on how LSP can be used in training on agile mindset, which is the core and central element of agile methods.This paper demonstrates how LSP can be utilized in agile training to reveal the agile mindset of participants.We describe our experience of utilising LSP in an agile training project for local software companies.Since the project was run during the COVID-19 pandemic, we adapted the LSP methodology for online settings, which was not straightforward because face-to-face interactions and tangible objects are key characteristics of LSP.In this experience report, we describe the design of the online LSP workshops and explain how to analyze LSP models to reveal the agile mindset of the participants and to tailor the training accordingly.We also provide evidence of the effectiveness of the LSP methodology in our training project.Drawing upon our experience, we synthesize a set of lessons learned and sketch recommendations for educators who intend to apply LSP in their future endeavours.

Abstract Social loafing is a common issue encountered by many software development teams. In practice, agile software development teams often use team expectations agreements (TEAs), which contain rules to prevent social loafing behaviour. However, few studies in the software engineering literature examine how these rules are specified in TEAs and whether they serve the purpose. The authors intend to provide a better understanding on how to specify rules in TEAs to prevent social loafing behaviour in agile software development teams. A mixed‐method approach using both qualitative and quantitative data was employed. The results of our study show that agile software development teams specify the expectations of the whole team on meeting attendance and contribution, respect of tasks, roles and teammates, and collaboration with each other. These rules have the potential to prevent social loafing behaviours. However, specifying the rules in TEAs alone is not sufficient to make them effective. It needs to be complemented with team commitment to TEA rules. The work of the authors contributes to a better understanding of how to use TEAs to prevent social loafing in agile software development teams, and provides a conceptual basis for future research to investigate social loafing prevention using TEAs.

Edge clusters consisting of small and affordable single-board devices are used in a range of different applications such as microcontrollers regulating an industrial process or controllers monitoring and managing traffic roadside. We call this wider context of computational infrastructure between the sensor and Internet-of-Things world and centralised cloud data centres the edge or edge computing. Despite the growing hardware capabilities of edge devices, resources are often still limited and need to be used intelligently. This can achieved by providing a self-adaptive scaling component in these clusters that is capable of scaling individual parts of the application running in the cluster. We propose an auto-scalable container-based cluster architecture for lightweight edge devices. A serverless architecture is at the core of the management solution. Our auto-scaler as the key component of this architecture is based on fuzzy logic in order to address challenges arising from an uncertain environment. In this context, it is crucial to evaluate the capabilities and limitations of the application in a real-world context. Our results show that the proposed platform architecture, the implemented application and the scaling functionality meet the set requirements and offer a basis for lightweight edge computing.

Clusters consisting of lightweight single-board devices are used in a variety of use cases: from microcon-trollers regulating the production process of an assembly line to roadside controllers monitoring and managing traffic. Often, data that is accumulated on the devices has to be sent to remote cloud data centers for processing. However, with hardware capabilities of controllers continuously increasing and the need for better performance and security through local processing, directly processing data on a remote cluster, known as Edge Computing, is a favourable solution. Recent trends such as microservices, containerization and server-less technology provide solutions for interconnecting the nodes and deploying software across the created cluster. This paper aims at proposing a serverless architecture for clustered container applications. The architecture relies on the MQTT protocol for communication, Prometheus for monitoring and Docker swarm in conjunction with openFaas for deploying services across a cluster. Using the proposed architecture as a foundation, a concrete traffic management application is implemented as a proof-of-concept. Results show that the proposed architecture meets performance requirements. However, the network setup as well as the network capabilities of the used devices were identified as potential bottlenecks.

In the current labor market, a large number of people engage in programming activities, even without being trained developers. Fostering Software Engineering (SE) principles at the K-12 level can increase the quality of the code that students will write in their future careers. Middle school students usually learn Computer Science (CS) as part of other disciplines; thus, the challenge is achieving the CS learning objectives and foster SE principles while fulfilling the curricular objectives. In this work, we describe a didactic module and its assessment framework; moreover, we report the results of a classroom experience that shows the effectiveness of the proposed approach. This work provides educators with a practical example of how to cover several areas of technology in a way for middle school students to be engaged and to spark future interest. The results encourage us to work on the development of the next modules dedicated to middle schools.

Full research paper—Online education can be delivered in many ways. For example, some MOOCs let students to proceed with their own pace, while others rely on strict schedules. Although the variety of how MOOCs can be organized is generally well understood, less is known about how the different ways of organizing MOOCs affect retention. In this work, we compare self-paced and fixed-schedule MOOCs in terms of retention and work-load. Using data from over 8.000 students participating in two versions of a massive open online course in programming, we observe that drop-out rates at the beginning of the courses are greater than towards the end of the courses, with self-paced MOOC being more extreme in this respect. Mostly because of different starts, the fixed-schedule course has a better overall retention rate (45%) than its self-paced counterpart (13%). We hypothesize that students initial investment of time and effort contributes to their persistence in their course, meaning that they do not want to let their initial investment go to waste. At the same time, in both self-paced and fixed-schedule MOOCs, there are students who receive almost full points from one week but fail to continue to the next week. This suggests that the issue of dropouts in MOOCs may also be related to participants struggling to take up new tasks or schedule their work over a longer time period. Our results support scheduling student activities in open online courses and opens up new research directions in engaging students in self-paced courses.

The constant increase of the amount of data generated by Internet of Things (IoT) devices creates challenges for the supporting cloud infrastructure, which is often used to process and store the data. This work focuses on an alternative approach, based on the edge cloud computing model, i.e., processing and filtering data before transferring it to a backing cloud infrastructure. We describe the implementation of a low-power and low-cost cluster of single board computers (SBC) for this context, applying models and technologies from the Big Data domain with the aim of reducing the amount of data which has to be transferred elsewhere. To implement the system, a cluster of Raspberry Pis was built, relying on Docker to containerize and deploy an Apache Hadoop and Apache Spark cluster, on which a test application is then executed. A monitoring stack based on Prometheus, a popular monitoring and alerting tool in the cloud-native industry, is used to gather system metrics and analyze the performance of the setup. We evaluate the complexity of the system, showing that by means of containerization increased fault tolerance and ease of maintenance can be achieved, which makes the proposed solution suitable for an industrial environment. Furthermore, an analysis of the overall performance, which takes into account the resource usage of the proposed solution with regards to the constraints imposed by the devices, is presented in order to discuss the capabilities and limitations of proposed architecture.

Many activities, such as computational thinking courses, are nowadays proposed in K-12 to prepare students for the current labour market, where being able to creatively use technology to solve problems is becoming increasingly important, and where more and more people are engaged in programming activities. Thus, there is a need to equip students with the necessary means to improve software quality, including non-vocational schools, where the challenge is leveraging existing curricular, non-programming activities to this end. This work explores the possibility of fostering software engineering principles in non-vocational high schools through curricular, non-programming activities. We describe two didactic modules and report the results of a classroom experience (involving 16 high school first-year students) that has been carried out to understand the effectiveness of the proposed approach. During the didactic modules, the participants achieved the objectives of the curricular activity, and at the same time learned how to organize their work by applying software en- gineering principles. These results allow us to formulate hypotheses for further work, such as extending our approach to other activities and observe if and when students will develop a “software engineering mindset”.

In recent years, an increasing number of people (called “end-users”) have started to perform a range of activities related to software development, such as coding with domain-specific languages. The research in the area of End-User Software Engineering (EUSE) aims at improving the quality of end-user-produced software by paying attention to the entire software life cycle. The increasing number of activities dedicated to the diffusion of coding in K-12 motivates the need of EUSE also in this environment. Students indeed will probably need to produce software in their future careers (even if not professionally), and the quality of their software may be crucial. In this work, we describe a didactic module in which the activities usually carried out in the existing study programme are exploited to introduce software engineering principles. The module does not shift the students’ attention from their main objectives and does not introduce additional lectures on software engineering topics. We describe the results of a first edition of the module that involved 17 students in a trilingual international high school. The results are promising and allow us to formulate hypotheses for further work, such as extending our approach to other activities and observe if and when students will develop a “software engineering mindset”, even without developing software.

In 2013, ACM recognized Computational Thinking (CT) as “one of the fundamental skills desired of all graduates”. This means that, especially in liberal education environments, one of the challenges of CT courses is to motivate students who are discouraged upfront as they perceive programming as a difficult task. Applications that have tangible results typically stimulate students’ interests. For instance, Educational Robotics (ER) is recognized as a tool to enhance higher order thinking skills and to facilitate teamwork. In this paper, we describe a course that has been designed to use ER (i.e., programming a maze-solving robot) to foster CT. Each activity of the course has been designed to foster specific CT skills and to contribute to CT assessment, which remains a challenge in CT research. We report the results of an experiment, in a liberal education environment, with a total of 13 ninth graders (15.4% M, 84.6% F).

[Background] A high-functioning team is a decisive factor for a successful software development project. However building such a team is not easy. Among many issues and obstacles encountered by teams, social loafing is a common but difficult one to tackle. [Aim] We intend to construct an approach to effectively prevent social loafing behaviors in software development teams. [Method] We built one social loafing prevention approach based on existing literature and survey instruments. It has been applied in an educational context with 2nd-year computer science students working on software development projects in teams. [Results] The approach starts with increasing team members' awareness of social loafing. Team Expectations Agreement (TEA) is then used to help the team to write down the terms that explicitly prevent social loafing. During the project, a small survey instrument is used to track regularly if the specified terms are followed by the team members. At the end of a period, the presence/absence of social loafing is assessed by the team using another short survey. How to interpret the results of the surveys is explained as part of the presented approach. [Conclusions] This approach has potential to improve team-work skills of students, which is not adequately addressed in higher education programs. Meanwhile it can be adapted in professional software development environments to prevent social loafing and improve teamwork. The next step of our study will be using the collected data to evaluate the proposed approach, and formulating a set of recommendations to use the approach in the professional software development context.

Computational Thinking (CT) has been recognized as one of the fundamental skills that all graduates should acquire. For this reason, motivational concerns need to be addressed at an early age of a child, and reaching students who do not consider themselves candidates for science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines is important as well if the broadest audience possible is to be engaged. This article describes a framework for teaching and assessing CT in the context of K-12 education. The framework is based on Agile software engineering methods, which rely on a set of principles and practices that can be mapped to the activities of CT. The article presents as well the results of an experiment applying this framework in two sixth-grade classes, with 42 participants in total. The results show that Agile software engineering methods are effective at teaching CT in middle schools, after the addition of some tasks to allow students to explore, project, and experience the potential product before using the software tools at hand. Moreover, according to the teachers’ feedback, the students reached all the educational objectives of the topics involved in the multidisciplinary activities. This result can be taken as an indicator that it is possible to use computing as a medium for teaching other subjects, besides computer science.

The capabilities and applications of new drones require a high demand of power that traditional batteries cannot sustain, triggering the need of developing strategies to promote efficient energy usage on drone platforms.However, to reduce the energy consumption it is required to have reliable means to measure the device's behavior and its relationship to the battery discharge.This paper introduces Green Flight, a software system that acquires data during a drone mission, featuring an online battery discharge analyzer and a real-time suggestions mode to help to optimize the overall power consumption of the drone, allowing for longer, more autonomous missions.

In the last decade, there has been increasing interest in pair programming (PP). However, despite the existing work, there is still a lack of substantial evidence of the effects of PP in industrial environments. To address this issue, we have analyzed the work of a team of 17 industrial developers for 14 months. The team is part of the IT department of a large Italian manufacturing company; it adopts a customized version of extreme programming (XP). We have investigated the effects of PP on software quality in five different scenarios. The results show that PP appears to provide a perceivable but small effect on the reduction of defects in these settings.

In this paper, we propose a method for predicting development effort based on user stories. Such approach is well suited for Agile software projects where requirements are developed along with the project and only sketched in a rough manner. We apply the proposed method to two industrial Agile software projects of very different size and structure. We show that such effort estimation works reasonably well if user stories are written in a structured way.

Novices' activities can be very different from those of experienced developers. The analysis of tool usage can propose early insights on novices integration in the team and also provide a method to compare their activities with experts. In this work we compare novices and experts in terms of tool usage, both in solo and in Pair Programming (PP). At the end of the integration process, novices activities are aligned to experts ones. Data for this study have been collected in an industrial team of 17 developers for a period of 10 months. The usage of AISEMA (Automated In-Process Software Engineering Measurement and Analysis) systems allowed us to have continuous, accurate and low cost measurement for our analysis.

In this paper we present a study on how pair programming (PP) facilitates the introduction of new developers (novices) in a team. Data has been collected non-invasively on how people paired in an industrial team of developers for 10 months; during such time novices joined the team. We focused on spontaneous PP, that is, on PP occurring when developers think it is most effective. Social network analysis techniques are used to analyze developers interactions and infer possible conclusions. It appears that initially PP is used to initiate novices, then it is drastically reduced to be resumed eventually when novices ldquofeelrdquo they have reached a significant level of maturity in the team. These phases are coherent with available works on group development and confirm existing findings on the importance of PP in the introduction of novices in teams, and, more generally, on team dynamics.