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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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].