Computer science instructors have one of the most crucial roles in training and making educational materials. However, they face many challenges everyday that make it difficult to provide a high-quality learning experience to their students. Additionally, demand for computer science training is rapidly increasing, and to meet this demand, classrooms need to run on a larger scale, which may exacerbate instructor pain points further. While many of the previous studies in the computer science education community have focused on improving the students' learning experience, in this study we investigate computer science instructors. It is paramount to understand how instructors can be supported more effectively while continuing to improve the material they use in their courses and allow them to focus on student needs. To understand these instructor challenges, we conducted semi-structured interviews with 32 computer science instructors at universities and community colleges to ask about their experiences in preparing course material, lecturing, grading, providing feedback to students, and what they wished they could change. In this paper, we summarize our findings as themes of challenges and pain points for instructors, the consequences of not solving them, and suggested guidelines that may help resolve or reduce these pain points.

The typical software tutorial includes step-by-step instructions for installing developer tools, editing files and code, and running commands. When these software tutorials are not executable, either due to missing instructions, ambiguous steps, or simply broken commands, their value is diminished. Non-executable tutorials impact developers in several ways, including frustrating learning experiences, and limiting usability of developer tools.

Developers neglect to update legacy software dependencies, resulting in buggy and insecure software. One explanation for this neglect is the difficulty of constantly checking for the availability of new software updates, verifying their safety, and addressing any migration efforts needed when upgrading a dependency. Emerging tools attempt to address this problem by introducing automated pull requests and project badges to inform the developer of stale dependencies. To understand whether these tools actually help developers, we analyzed 7,470 GitHub projects that used these notification mechanisms to identify any change in upgrade behavior. Our results find that, on average, projects that use pull request notifications upgraded 1.6× as often as projects that did not use any tools. Badge notifications were slightly less effective: users upgraded 1.4× more frequently. Unfortunately, although pull request notifications are useful, developers are often overwhelmed by notifications: only a third of pull requests were actually merged. Through a survey, 62 developers indicated that their most significant concerns are breaking changes, understanding the implications of changes, and migration effort. The implications of our work suggests ways in which notifications can be improved to better align with developers' expectations and the need for new mechanisms to reduce notification fatigue and improve confidence in automated pull requests.