From Kent Beck's point of view, Test-Driven Development (TDD) really encourages simple design and inspires confidence. This agile software engineering practice suggests a different programming way that requires writing tests before writing the code in short cycles to reduce feedbacks loops. To help novice programmers discover and appreciate it, this paper describes an experience based on a laboratory course for learning TDD by developping a Space Invaders game through a step-by-step project-driven approach. To improve student engagement, a game development is chosen. All concepts are taught within the context of this project and students learn by doing. Applied in the context of a basis of object-oriented design course, this experience should raise student awareness of design's and programming's good practices as testing, refactoring, simple design and short releases. The evaluation shows that this experience helps students to engage in the learning process, to reflect on the importance of testing in a software development, to make aware of code quality and to understand the benefits of TDD.

This paper presents a specific sequence of collaborative workshops dedicated to build a first version of a product backlog. This backlog is composed by user stories refined from a first idea of the product to develop.

The Specification By Example (SBE) is a guideline for building the right software, a software that meets customer requirements. It is based on seven process patterns and enhances communication and collaboration and it usually is used in agile software development. The connection between education and agile software development sounds actually as an emergent topic. In this paper, we propose to structure a teaching approach in analogy to an agile software developement by transposing each process pattern of SBE to a corresponding one in the teaching domain. Moreover, we show that thanks to the emergence of a collective intelligence process, the students are more confident and more responsible. Such a course offers the opportunity to learn not only technical skills, but also some values in a new mindset.

With the advent of languages and tools dedicated to model-driven engineering (e.g., ATL, Kermeta, EMF), as well as reference metamodels (MOF, Ecore), model-driven development processes can be used easily. However, the maturity of a software engineering technology should be evaluated by the degree of use of trace ability practices. One of the first major challenges consists in generating automatically trace information during a transformation process. Our contribution is a tool dedicated to infer traces during the execution of a model transformation. This tool is based on aspect oriented programming which permits us to isolate management of traces and imperative transformations code in a Java/EMF environment. A meta-model of nested traces allows the visualisation of traces as nested graphs which represent the trace ability links and the control flow diagram of the execution. A model-to-model case study is proposed as an example to illustrate our contribution.

To ensure the use of good analysis and design practices and an easier maintenance of software, analysts and designers may use patterns. To help them, we propose models inspection in order to detect instantiations of "spoiled pattern" and models reworking through the use of the design patterns. As a design pattern allows the instantiation of the best known solution for a given problem, a "spoiled pattern" allows the instantiation of alternative solutions for the same problem: requirements are respected, but architecture is improvable. We have collected a set of alternative solutions and deduced the corresponding spoiled patterns. We have defined a first catalog of these improvable practices from several experiments with students. To overcome the limits imposed by this method (restricted public, limited problems and tiresome validation process), we would like to open this problematic to the expert community. Therefore, we propose a collaborative website sharing bad practices in object oriented design to improve the use of patterns.

Investigates the separation between types and classes by putting to use a special feature of Java regarding classes, interfaces and inheritance. We propose an original method which, from a single inheritance class hierarchy, extracts a multiple inheritance interface hierarchy, which contains all the types of the original hierarchy, each class being linked to the interface representing its type. In the resulting structure, interfaces are well-organized and follow a natural multiple specialization, which would not have been possible using only the single inheritance which comes with Java. Our method is based on the use of a Galois lattice, which is a reference for the elaboration of hierarchies. We introduce and justify the need for a new algorithm that efficiently builds an essential part of the Galois lattice.