Despite the availability of a host of software design notations and associated tools, software developers are known to frequently turn to the whiteboard when faced with a specific design problem. There, they typically engage in an informal form of software design that relies heavily on sketching. However, whereas whiteboards afford flexibility and fluidity, they at the same time limit a designer in only being able to draw and erase content. This paper presents Calico, a novel software design tool that leverages electronic whiteboards to enhance the design experience with explicit support for the creative, exploratory aspects of design. Specifically, Calico offers a grid, scraps, and a palette together with gesture-based input to address several natural behaviors exhibited by software designers, including frequent shifts in focus, use of low-detail models, and use of a mix of notations. To evaluate Calico, we performed a laboratory experiment involving eight pairs of graduate students and collected and analyzed six corporate design sessions that employed Calico. Results are promising and indicate the benefits of Calico, while they at the same time highlight several ways in which it can be enhanced.

In this paper, we describe a multi-site evaluation of SimSE, an educational software engineering simulation game. This study was designed to build on our previous experience of evaluating SimSE in courses and controlled lab settings at UC Irvine, in order to validate our findings and discover any factors that come into play when SimSE is used in other institutions. The study consisted of three different universities using SimSE in their respective courses and reporting the results to us. The results confirmed several of our previous findings, as well as highlighted a number of critical considerations that must be taken into account when using SimSE in a course.

Software engineering educational approaches are often evaluated only anecdotally, or in informal pilot studies. We describe a more comprehensive approach to evaluating a software engineering educational technique (SimSE, a graphical, interactive, customizable, game-based software engineering simulation environment). Our method for evaluating SimSE went above and beyond anecdotal experience and approached evaluation from a number of different angles through a family of studies designed to assess SimSE's effectiveness and guide its development. In this paper, we demonstrate the insights and lessons that can be gained when using such a multi-angled evaluation approach. Our hope is that, from this paper, educators will: (1) learn ideas about how to more comprehensively evaluate their own approaches, and (2) be provided with evidence about the educational effectiveness of SimSE.

Simulation is an educational tool that is commonly used to teach processes that are infeasible to practice in the real world. Software process education is a domain that has not yet taken full advantage of the benefits of simulation. To address this, we have developed SimSE, an educational, interactive, graphical environment for building and simulating software engineering processes in a game-like setting. We detail the design of SimSE, present an initial simulation model of a waterfall process that we developed, and describe an experiment that we conducted to evaluate the educational potential of SimSE and its initial model

Virtually all software engineering courses employ class projects in which students practice their newly-learned skills. By necessity, these projects tend to be of a small scale. In efforts to better educate students in the many aspects and pitfalls of the software process, different alternatives have been tried over time. In this paper, we describe one such experience in which we put all thirty-two students in the course on a single, large project and gave them the open-ended task of building a prototype of "a better software design environment. " This lead to a completely new set of dynamics and interesting opportunities to teach topics that normally would not be covered or illustrated by students' experiences in a regular software project. We introduce our course design, present its progression over the quarter, illustrate its strengths and weaknesses, and discuss critical factors for its repeatability

No abstract available.

The typical software engineering course consists of lectures in which concepts and theories are conveyed, along with a small "toy" software engineering project which attempts to give students the opportunity to put this knowledge into practice. Although both of these components are essential, neither one provides students with adequate practical knowledge regarding the process of software engineering. Namely, lectures allow only passive learning, and projects are so constrained by the time and scope requirements of the academic environment that they cannot be large enough to exhibit many of the phenomena occurring in realworld software engineering processes. To address this problem, we have developed Problems and Programmers, an educational card game that simulates the software engineering process and is designed to teach those process issues that are not sufficiently highlighted by lectures and projects. We describe how the game is designed, the mechanics of its game play, and the results of an experiment we conducted involving students playing the game.

Problems and Programmers is an educational card game that we have developed to help teach software engineering. It is based on the observation that students, in a typical software engineering course, gain little practical experience in issues regarding the software process. The underlying problem is time: any course faces the practical constraint of only being able to involve students in at most a few small software development projects. Problems and Programmers overcomes this limitation by providing a simulation of the software process. In playing the game, students become aware of not only general lessons, such as the fact that they must continuously make tradeoffs among multiple potential next steps, but also specific issues such as the fact that inspections improve the quality of code but delay its delivery time. We describe game play of Problems and Programmers, discuss its underlying design, and report on the results of a small experiment in which twenty-eight students played the game.