The gender imbalance in technology, sciences, and engineering is a global problem and according to the statistics, this really has not changed much in the last thirty years. Moreover, there is also a lack of women in tech entrepreneurship; most success stories are about male entrepreneurs, and in Silicon Valley the term describing the start-up culture is called “tech bros” for a reason. This paper identifies different factors affecting the women's decision to select a tech sector and become an entrepreneur in the tech sector. In this paper we also aim to identify different pitfalls and problems, which could influence the attractiveness of the tech sector, and specifically technology entrepreneurship, towards the women interested in the science, technology, and engineering domains. To study the factors affecting women's interest towards entrepreneurship in the technology sector, we conducted a series of surveys and interviews to understand the underlying phenomena. Overall, this study interviewed ten female company founders, and conducted two surveys with women working, interested, or studying towards the tech sector, allowing us to combine and compare the qualitative data from the women who had become entrepreneurs against the quantitative trends and ideas collected from the general audiences. The most common factors limiting the individuals’ interest towards entrepreneurship such as financial risks or high responsibilities might not be gender-related, but there are also aspects as social acceptance, discrimination, and lack of role models, which affect especially the women interested in the possibilities of becoming an entrepreneur in tech. In general, the current younger generations are aware of the option of becoming entrepreneurs, and what becoming one requires. Initiatives, such as adding positive examples of females’ success, or supporting entry-level opportunities towards full-time entrepreneurship, could have a meaningful impact of reducing the gender imbalance in the STEM fields, and in technology entrepreneurship in general.

Personalization is an upcoming trend in gamification research, with several researchers proposing that gamified systems should take personal characteristics into account. However, creating good gamified designs is effort intensive as it is and tailoring system interactions to each user will only add to this workload. We propose machine learning algorithm -based personalized content selection to address a part of this problem and present a process for creating personalized designs that allows automating a part of the implementation. The process is based on Deterding’s 2015 framework for gameful design, the lens of intrinsic skill atoms, with additional steps for selecting a personalization strategy and algorithm creation. We then demonstrate the process by implementing personalized gamification for a computer-supported collaborative learning environment. For this demonstration, we use the gamification user type hexad for personalization and the heuristics for effective design of gamification for overall design. The result of the applied design process is a context-aware, personalized gamification ruleset for collaborative environments. Lastly, we present a method for translating gamification rulesets to machine-readable classifier algorithm using the CN2 rule inducer.

Testing and quality assurance are characterized as the most expensive tasks in the software life cycle. However, several studies also indicate that the industry could enhance product quality and reduce costs by investing in developing testing practices. Software engineering educators can bridge the gap between formal education and industry practices to produce more industry-ready graduates, by observing the industry in action. To find out the current state of industry, we conducted a study in software organizations to assess how they test their products and which process models they follow. According to the survey results, the organizations rely heavily on test automation and use sophisticated testing infrastructures, apply agile practices even when working with mission-critical software, and have reduced the use of formal process reference and assessment models. Based on the results, this paper identifies a number of key learning objectives in quality assurance and software testing disciplines that the industry expects from university graduates. The principles of constructive alignment are used to present learning goals, teaching methods, and assessment methods that align with the industry requirements.

Context: Software projects often have four objectives; to produce the required functionality, in budget and in schedule, with acceptable quality. That statement may be true for most of the ordinary software development projects, but are these objectives enough for game development, where creativity and artistic aspects have a major role? Goal: We analyze how game developing organizations test their products, what are their main test objectives and how they perceive themselves in the software business. Method: We interviewed seven game development teams from different companies and studied how they test their products with grounded theory approach. Results: Our results suggest that game developers focus on soft values such as game content or user experience, instead of more traditional objectives such as reliability or efficiency. Conclusions: Game developers have similar, but not fully comparable to software industry, set of priorities in their software testing and quality assurance approaches.

Context: Development of software is a complex process with several stakeholders and their varying practices. The game industry has also additional requirements such as artistic presentation, an interesting story and high quality sound effects that further complicate the process. Objective: The objective of this paper is to understand what kind of requirements and expectations are attached to the technical infrastructure of game development in practice. Method: This study observed and qualitatively analyzed seven game-developing organizations, from recent startups to established organizations to allow comparison of their use of technical infrastructure. Results: Based on our study, the game organizations, regardless of their size, are generally pleased with the tools they apply. The selections of the applied tools are based on their ability to test concepts and build prototypes to help design. Conclusion: In general, the game development organizations expect their tools to allow adaptability to changes during the development process. The case companies did not seem to have many problems with their current technical infrastructure, and ability to test different solutions was considered very important feature.

Software projects have four main objectives; produce required functionalities, with acceptable quality, in budget and in schedule. Usually these objectives are implemented by setting requirements for the software projects, and working towards achieving these requirements as well as possible. So how is the intended quality handled in this process of pursuing project goals? The objective of this study is to explore how organizations understand software quality and identify factors which seem to affect the quality outcome of the development process. The study applies two research approaches; a survey with 31 organizations and in-depth interviews with 36 software professional from 12 organizations for identifying concepts that affect quality. The study confirms that the quality in software organization is a complex, interconnected entity, and the definitions of desired and perceived quality fluctuate between different process stakeholders. Overall, in many cases the software organizations have identified the desired quality, but are not communicating it properly.

It has been estimated that more than two million students started computing studies in 1999 and 650,000 of them either dropped or failed their first programming course. For the individual student, dropping such a course can distract from the completion of later courses in a computing curriculum and may even result in changing their course of study to a curriculum without programming. In this article, we report on how we set out to rehabilitate a troubled first programming course, one for which the dropout statistic and repercussion was evident. The five-year longitudinal case study described in this article began by systematically tracking the pass rate of a first programming course, its throughput, as proposed by the Theory of Constraints. The analyses of these data indicated three main problems in the course: programming discipline difficulty, course arrangement complexity, and limited student motivation. The motivation problem was approached from the Two-Factor Theory point of view. It investigated those factors that led to dissatisfaction among the students, the hygiene factors, and those factors that led to satisfaction, the intrinsic and extrinsic motivators. The course arrangement complexity was found to be a hygiene factor, while the lack of extrinsic and intrinsic motivators contributed to the high dropout rates. The course improvement efforts made no attempt to change the inherent characteristics of the programming discipline, but introduced holistic changes in the course arrangements over a five-year period, from 2005 to 2009, to eliminate the hygiene factors and to increase motivational aspects of the course. This systems approach to course improvement resulted in an increase in the pass rate, from 44% prior to the changes to 68% thereafter, and the overall course atmosphere turned positive. This paper reports on the detailed changes that were made and the improvements that were achieved over this five-year period.

The objective of this qualitative study was to observe and empirically study how software organizations decide on which test cases to select for their software projects. As the software test processes are limited in resources such as time or money, a selection process usually exists for tested features. In this study we conducted a survey on 31 software-producing organizations, and interviewed 36 software professionals from 12 focus organizations to gain a better insight into testing practices. Our findings indicated that the basic approaches to test case selection are usually oriented towards two possible objectives. One is the risk-based selection, where the aim is to focus testing on those parts that are too expensive to fix after launch. The other is design-based selection, where the focus is on ensuring that the software is capable of completing the core operations it was designed to do. These results can then be used to develop testing organizations and to identify better practices for test case selection.

This paper introduces the research topic of “Elaborating Software Test Processes and Strategies”, in which I with assistance from our research group conducted a qualitative study on software producing organization's test processes. My goal is to develop a reference model for organizations to enhance and develop their test processes based on the upcoming ISO/IEC 29119 software testing standard by interviewing professional software developers from different phases of software process. The study focuses on the aspects that compose testing strategy; human resources, test tools, test case selection, testing methods and the role of the management in the test process to name few of the major components. Based on the preliminary results, there exists room for improvements in testability of the software products and focusing the available test resources, problems which could be addressed by means of systematic process improvement and defining test strategy for the organization.

In this paper, we studied the differences in testing activities between software organizations which apply agile development methods and organizations which take the traditional plan-driven approach. Our focus was on the concepts which allow the software organization to successfully apply agile development methods or plan-driven methods. We also observed the test process enhancements and hindrances, which originate in the selected development method. We interviewed 12 organizations, which were selected to represent different polar types of software production. The interviews were tape-recorded and transcribed for further analysis. The study yielded hypotheses which were derived by applying the qualitative grounded theory method. The results indicated that in practice, agile methods can improve the position of testing through the early involvement of testing activities in development, and also have a positive influence on end-product satisfaction. By applying these results, organizations can improve their processes and avoid pitfalls when transitioning to agile methods.

The objective of this qualitative study was to explore and understand the problems of software testing in practice and find improvement proposals for these issues. The study focused on organizational units that develop and test technical software for automation or telecommunication domains, for which a survey of testing practices was conducted and 26 organizations were interviewed. From this sample, five organizations were further selected for an in-depth grounded theory case study. The analysis yielded hypotheses indicating that a software project design should promote testability as architectural attribute and apply specialized personnel to enhance testing implementation. Testing tools should also be selected based on usability and configurability criteria. These results of this study can be used in developing the efficiency of software testing and in development of the testing strategy for organization.

Decreasing interest in computer science and programming has caused trouble to many institutions recently. To tackle this issue an active improvement of the first programming course was started four years ago. In this paper the adopted action research approach is described together with the improved results from the course. The improvement actions have so far focused on the technical infrastructure of the course including the used programming language, development environment, weekly assignments, course project, and teaching materials. Even though the technical infrastructure still has deficiencies, the limit of improvement possible with efforts focusing on the technical aspects is approaching, and continued improvement requires moving the improvement focus on the pedagogical aspects.

In this paper we present a concept for three-phase measuring method, which can be used to obtain data on student learning. The focus of this method lies on the technical aspects of learning programming, answering questions like which programming constructs students applied and how large portion of the students understood the concepts of programming language.