Software testing is an important part of the software development lifecycle. As it is a highly sought-after skill in the industry, it is not surprising that there has been a great deal of research into the teaching of software testing in higher education. Most of this research proposes or evaluates pedagogical approaches or software testing tools to assist teachers in educating the next generation of software engineers. These evaluations are often limited to measuring teachers’ opinions about the use of a novel pedagogical approach or an educational tool and students’ acceptance and performance in terms of desired software testing skills. While tools and pedagogical approaches address specific aspects of a course, to date, little attention has been paid to the opinions of the students about all the individual aspects of a software testing course. This paper aims to address this missing student perspective by taking a holistic view of software testing course designs. To address this gap, an exploratory study was performed by distributing a questionnaire to 103 students from ten different courses to gauge their opinions on a software testing course they are enrolled in. The results show that students generally have a positive perception of the different aspects of their software testing course. However, several areas for improvement were suggested based on the gathered data.

Application frameworks are a powerful technique for large-scale reuse, but require a considerable effort to understand them. Good documentation is costly, as it needs to address different audiences with disparate learning needs. When code and documentation prove insufficient, developers turn to their network of experts. Nevertheless, this proves difficult, mainly due to the lack of expertise awareness (who to ask), wasteful interruptions of the wrong people and unavailability (either due to intrusion or time constraints). The DRIVER platform is a collaborative learning environment where framework users can, in a non-intrusive way, store and share their learning knowledge while following the best practices of framework understanding (patterns). Developed by the authors, it provides a framework documentation repository, mounted on a wiki, where the learning paths of the community of learners can be captured, shared, rated, and recommended. Combining these social activities, the DRIVER platform promotes collaborative learning, mitigating intrusiveness, unavailability of experts and loss of tacit knowledge. This paper presents the assessment of DRIVER using a controlled academic experiment that measured the performance, effectiveness and framework knowledge intake of MSc students. The study concluded that, especially for novice learners, the platform allows for a faster and more effective learning process.

Application frameworks are a powerful technique for large-scale reuse but often very hard to learn from scratch. Although good documentation helps on reducing the learning curve, it is often found lacking, and costly, as it needs to attend different audiences with disparate learning needs. When code and documentation prove insufficient, developers turn to their network of experts. The lack of awareness about the experts, interrupting the wrong people, and experts unavailability are well known hindrances to effective collaboration. This paper presents the DRIVER platform, a collaborative learning environment for framework users to share their knowledge. It provides the documentation on a wiki, where the learning paths of the community of learners can be captured, shared, rated, and recommended, thus tapping into the collective knowledge of the community of framework users. The tool can be obtained at http://bit.ly/driverTool.

A cada vez mais crescente qualidade nos serviços e tratamentos na área da saúde levou a um crescimento enorme da esperança média de vida nas últimas décadas, o que resulta num aumento do número de pessoas idosas (com idade igual ou superior a 65 anos). Das doenças associadas ao envelhecimento, a Doença de Alzheimer (AD) é uma das mais prevalentes, representando uma taxa de até 80% de todos os casos de demência. Devido aos seus sintomas (perda de memória, mudanças de humor, desorientação no tempo, espaço e às pessoas, entre outros) a doença representa um pesado fardo para o paciente, o prestador de cuidados de saúde e o sistema de saúde. Isto mostra que soluções que abordem este tema e que tentem melhorar a forma como a doença é abordada atualmente são urgentes e necessárias. A investigação feita relativamente ao estado da arte da forma de lidar com a doença demonstrou que existem dificuldades: em obter informação sobre o paciente periodicamente; em ser capaz de providenciar ao paciente uma forma de fazer reabilitação num ambiente remoto; em estabelecer um contacto mais permanente e constante com o prestador de cuidados de saúde relativamente a aspetos importantes que acontecem com o paciente e que podem mudar a taxa de progressão da doença; e, por último, em fornecer aos profissionais de saúde uma forma de analisar de forma fácil e intuitiva a progressão da doença. Esta dissertação aborda estas questões propondo um sistema capaz de: providenciar os profissionais médicos com informação recolhida periodicamente do paciente e do cuidador; aumentar a proximidade entre o cuidador e os profissionais médicos; permitir ao paciente realizar exercícios de estimulação cognitiva num ambiente offline e remoto e de suportar a análise da progressão da doença por partes dos profissionais médicos. Para o sistema ser útil, era necessário que fosse desenhado tendo em conta os seus utilizadores finais. Assim, as suas interfaces foram desenhadas tendo em conta as guidelines existentes no que toca a desenvolvimento para idosos, e mais especificamente para idosos com demência. Estas foram testadas e ajustadas de acordo com o feedback dos intervenientes finais do sistema (profissionais médicos, pacientes e cuidadores). O feedback recebido por parte dos profissionais médicos e dos cuidadores é positivo e os resultados obtidos através do teste do sistema são promissores.

Software development is a social activity. Teams of developers join together to coordinate their efforts to produce software systems. This effort encompasses the development of a shared understanding surrounding multiple artifacts throughout the process. Frameworks are a powerful technique for large-scale reuse, but its complexity makes them hard to understand and learn how to use. Developers resort to their colleagues for help and insight, at the expense of time and intrusion, as documentation is often outdated and incomplete. This paper presents an approach to harness this collective knowledge of the team through a collaborative environment. Teams can share, rank and recommend their learning knowledge without too much intrusion and follow best practices of framework understanding.

Object-oriented frameworks are a powerful reuse technique but they are also very complex and difficult to design. Framework’s design aims at separating the invariant aspects across several applications in a domain – frozen spots – from the aspects that vary among applications and thus must be kept flexible and customizable – hot spots. The flexibility and extensibility provided at hot spots is usually achieved by following common design patterns, which are often hard and tiresome to identify without proper documentation. This paper proposes a reverse engineering approach to identify the design patterns used in a framework, using a high-level hot spot representation. The goals of this work include: researching a design approach that produces usable intermediate reuse information; defining a representation for design patterns based on meta-patterns; and developing a supporting tool to automate the reverse engineering process.