Self-tracking technology can help users develop new knowledge about themselves, supporting their health and general wellbeing. Most of these devices inform users about their lives by autonomously generating data about highly constrained topics. Recent research has started to explore more flexible, manual self-tracking systems, which allow users to express themselves through their data and learn by engaging with their experiences in-the-moment. This article describes a field trial using the Chromatize app, designed to explore the value of minimalism and flexibility — including in data histories — in personal tracking systems. Our data indicate that low-burden experience logging systems which focus on the creation of symbolically-rich, self-defined data can support self-awareness, reflection and regulation at opportune moments. The analysis also contributes a formulation of reflection in the context of self-tracking technologies that is more meaningful than the loose use of ‘reflection’ used in much of the literature.

Despite the availability of various methods and tools to facilitate secure coding, developers continue to write code that contains common vulnerabilities. It is important to understand why technological advances do not sufficiently facilitate developers in writing secure code. To widen our understanding of developers' behaviour, we considered the complexity of the security decision space of developers using theory from cognitive and social psychology. Our interdisciplinary study reported in this article (1) draws on the psychology literature to provide conceptual underpinnings for three categories of impediments to achieving security goals, (2) reports on an in-depth meta-analysis of existing software security literature that identified a catalogue of factors that influence developers' security decisions, and (3) characterises the landscape of existing security interventions that are available to the developer during coding and identifies gaps. Collectively, these show that different forms of impediments to achieving security goals arise from different contributing factors. Interventions will be more effective where they reflect psychological factors more sensitively and marry technical sophistication, psychological frameworks, and usability. Our analysis suggests “adaptive security interventions” as a solution that responds to the changing security needs of individual developers and a present a proof-of-concept tool to substantiate our suggestion.

Research has established the wide variety of security failures in mobile apps, their consequences, and how app developers introduce or exacerbate them. What is not well known is why developers do so---what is the rationale underpinning the decisions they make which eventually strengthen or weaken app security? This is all the more complicated in modern app development's increasingly diverse demographic: growing numbers of independent, solo, or small team developers who do not have the organizational structures and support that larger software development houses enjoy.

Peer review is a mainstay of academic publication - indeed, it is the peer-review process that provides much of the publications' credibility. This working group is examining the ways peer review is used in various computing education venues and will use this examination to articulate community standards for peer review in this discipline.

This talk will reflect on decades of empirical research on software design in high-performing teams and by experts. The talk will present three broad perspectives: It will identify some of the particular challenges of designing software and the practices that experts use to address them. It will characterise expert software design in terms of a complex of design dialogues. It will consider how expert practice can inform how we teach software design.

We describe our experience of working with blind and visually impaired people to create interactive art objects that are personal to them, through a participatory making process using electronic textiles (e-textiles) and hands-on crafting techniques. The research addresses both the practical considerations about how to structure hands-on making workshops in a way which is accessible to participants of varying experience and abilities, and how effective the approach was in enabling participants to tell their own stories and feel in control of the design and making process. The results of our analysis is the offering of insights in how to run e-textile making sessions in such a way for them to be more accessible and inclusive to a wider community of participants.

Many Smart City projects are beginning to consider the role of citizens. However, current methods for engaging urban populations in participatory design (PD) activities are somewhat limited. In this article, we describe an approach taken to empower socially disadvantaged citizens, using a variety of both social and technological tools, in a Smart City project. Through analysing the nature of citizens’ concerns and proposed solutions, we explore the benefits of our approach, arguing that engaging citizens can uncover hyper-local concerns that provide a foundation for finding solutions to address citizen concerns. By reflecting on our approach, we identify four key challenges to utilising PD at an urban scale; balancing scale with the personal, who has control of the process, who is participating and integrating citizen-led work with local authorities. By addressing these challenges, we will be able to truly engage citizens as collaborators in co-designing their city.

Software rarely works as intended while it is being written. Things go wrong in the midst of everyday practice, and developers are commonly understood to form theories and strategies for dealing with them. Errors in this sense are not bugs left behind in software, they are actively encountered and experienced. This paper reports findings of an ethnographically-informed study undertaken to examine error encountered at the desk. Films depicting paired open-source development practice over the course of a month were analyzed to identify and delineate instances of active error. Instances were interpreted within a framework of error handling drawn from psychology research. Analyses of representative instances are given and discussed in relation to software engineering research that examines practice at the desk. Findings demonstrate that the significance of active error in software development is personal, shaped by passing time, the emergence of preferred practices and environmental changes.

Whiteboard sketches play a crucial role in software development, helping to support groups of designers in reasoning about a software design problem at hand. However, little is known about these sketches and how they support design ‘in the moment’, particularly in terms of the relationships among sketches, visual syntactic elements within sketches, and reasoning activities. To address this gap, we analyzed 14 hours of design activity by eight pairs of professional software designers, manually coding over 4000 events capturing the introduction of visual syntactic elements into sketches, focus transitions between sketches, and reasoning activities. Our findings indicate that sketches serve as a rich medium for supporting design conversations. Designers often use general-purpose notations. Designers introduce new syntactic elements to record aspects of the design, or re-purpose sketches as the design develops. Designers constantly shift focus between sketches, using groups of sketches together that contain complementary information. Finally, sketches play an important role in supporting several types of reasoning activities (mental simulation, review of progress, consideration of alternatives). But these activities often leave no trace and rarely lead to sketch creation. We discuss the implications of these and other findings for the practice of software design at the whiteboard and for the creation of new electronic software design sketching tools.

Whiteboards serve an important role in supporting informal design, providing a fluid and flexible medium for collaborative design. Interactive whiteboards offer the potential for enhanced support for manipulating content, managing sketches, and distributed work, but little is known about how this support affects the practice of informal design. To understand the opportunities and challenges, we first conducted a literature review, identifying 14 behaviors that occur during informal design. We then designed an interactive whiteboard system to support all of these behaviors and deployed the system to three groups of designers. Through usage logs and interviews, we examined the effects of interactivity on whiteboard use across a wide spectrum of design behaviors, identifying ways in which interactive whiteboards support the practices used in physical whiteboards and where they enable designers to work more effectively.

The paper addresses the problem of engaging part-time PhD students studying at a distance in a community of students. It reports on a longitudinal survey of part-time Computing PhD students' use of digital technologies to support them in engaging in formal and informal doctoral dialogues, documenting and reflecting on their research, engaging with the community, and keeping themselves informed. It considers `what works' in students' deployment of technologies and highlights both changes in use and persistent phenomena.

Methodology implementation failure is attributed to developer mediocrity (by management) – not to organizational mediocrity (rigidity or control-driven, process-driven management), or to a lack of adaptation capability in the methodology. In supporting software construction as a creative process, however, we must promote excellence rather than conformity. We argue that we – through principled research -- must pay attention to the interplay between methodology and culture – the local adaptations needed to make things work, understand how the two co-evolve and how they may contribute together to software quality.

UML has been described by some as “the lingua franca of software engineering”. Evidence from industry does not necessarily support such endorsements. How exactly is UML being used in industry – if it is? This paper presents a corpus of interviews with 50 professional software engineers in 50 companies and identifies 5 patterns of UML use.

In this paper, we describe a new undergraduate module for novice students conducted entirely through distance learning: My Digital Life (TU100). The module has been designed to lower the barriers to creating programs that interact with the world; TU100's materials have been designed to excite, encourage, reassure and support learners who explore the novel topic of ubiquitous computing through playful experimentation. It introduces the fundamentals of computing by giving students the capability for programming a device, the SenseBoard, which has built-in input/output and sensors. Programming is done in Sense, an extension of Scratch, which scaffolds programming and reduces the syntax burden. TU100 has taken inspiration from childhood learning and commercial product design to produce compelling, yet academically rigorous study materials.

For over a century, studio-based instruction has served as an effective pedagogical model in architecture and fine arts education. Because of its design orientation, human-computer interaction (HCI) education is an excellent venue for studio-based instruction. In an HCI course, we have been exploring a studio-based learning activity called the prototype walkthrough , in which a student project team simulates its evolving user interface prototype while a student audience member acts as a test user. The audience is encouraged to ask questions and provide feedback. We have observed that prototype walkthroughs create excellent conditions for learning about user interface design. In order to better understand the educational value of the activity, we performed a content analysis of a video corpus of 16 prototype walkthroughs held in two HCI courses. We found that the prototype walkthrough discussions were dominated by relevant design issues. Moreover, mirroring the justification behavior of the expert instructor, students justified over 80 percent of their design statements and critiques, with nearly one-quarter of those justifications having a theoretical or empirical basis. Our findings suggest that PWs provide valuable opportunities for students to actively learn HCI design by participating in authentic practice, and provide insight into how such opportunities can be best promoted.

Recent research suggests that the motivating factors in software engineering are evolving and that our current understanding of motivation in software engineering might be out of date. This paper presents an analysis of semi-structured interviews with 13 professional software engineers. The data suggests that 'the work' continues to be enjoyable and that 'people' are important, but that 'obstacles' really sap the energy of software engineers.

For over a century, studio-based instruction has served as an effective pedagogical model in architecture and fine arts education. Because of its design orientation, human-computer interaction (HCI) education is an excellent venue for studio-based instruction. In an HCI course, we have been exploring a studio-based learning activity called the prototype walkthrough, in which a student project team simulates its evolving user interface prototype while a student audience member acts as a test user. The audience is encouraged to ask questions and provide feedback. We have observed that prototype walkthroughs create excellent conditions for learning about user interface design. In order to better understand the educational value of the activity, we performed a content analysis of a video corpus of 16 prototype walkthroughs held in two undergraduate/graduate HCI courses. We found that the prototype walkthrough discussions were dominated by relevant design issues. Moreover, mirroring the justification behavior of the expert instructor, students justified over 80 percent of their design statements and critiques, with nearly one-quarter of those justifications having a theoretical or empirical basis. These results suggest that prototype walkthroughs can be useful not only in helping to teach HCI design, but also in helping to gauge students' evolving design knowledge.

Modeling tools are often not used for tasks during the software lifecycle for which they should be more helpful; instead free-from approaches, such as office tools and white boards, are frequently used. Prior workshops explored why this is the case and what might be done about it. The goal of this workshop is to continue those discussions and also to form an initial set of challenge problems and research challenges that researchers and developers of flexible modeling tools should address.

Software practitioner motivation has been recognised as a key factor in system quality, yet much of what we know about practitioner motivation is based on research conducted decades ago. In this paper, we present the analysis of data collected from 23 current practitioners at a workshop on motivation. This is the third in a series of workshops, each aimed at investigating the motivational factors in current software practice. We found that people factors are those most often cited, which reinforces the findings from the two previous workshops. This has implications for motivational programmes in software organisations, and indicates the need for further empirical research in the area.

Software is a designed artifact. In other design disciplines, such as architecture, there is a well-established tradition of design studies which inform not only the discipline itself but also tool design, processes, and collaborative work. The 'challenge' of this paper is to consider software from such a 'design studies' perspective. This paper will present a series of observations from empirical studies of expert software designers, and will draw on examples from actual professional practice. It will consider what experts' mental imagery, software visualisations, and sketches suggest about software design thinking. It will also discuss some of the deliberate practices experts use to promote innovation. Finally, it will open discussion on the tensions between observed software design practices and received methodology in software engineering.

Agile software development promotes feedback, discipline and close collaboration between all members of the development team, and de-emphasises documentation, ‘big design up front’ and hierarchical processes. Agile teams tend to be co-located and multi-disciplinary, and rely heavily on face-to-face communication and seemingly simple physical artefacts to support interaction. In this paper we focus on the functionality of two key physical artefacts – the story card and the Wall – which, individually and in combination, underpin the team’s activity. These artefacts have two main roles – one which enables a shared understanding of requirements and one which facilitates the development process itself. We consider these roles from two perspectives: a notational perspective and a social perspective. This discussion shows how the two perspectives – the notational and the social – intertwine and are mutually supportive. Any attempt to replace these physical artefacts with alternative support for an agile team needs to take account of both perspectives, and the complex relationships between them.

Children who are active on the Internet are performing significant design and programming activity without realising it, in the course of hacking little animations, game scripts and so on. What does such effortless learning suggest about how to support end-user programming? This paper presents observations of 'unwitting' design and programming activity by a small group of teenagers, aged 12-17. It analyses their adoption and appropriation of technology, and discusses how such practices are embedded in social networks.

A customer's experience with an e-commerce environment extends beyond the interaction with the website, including delivery of products, post-sales support, consumption of products and services, and so on. It is the total customer experience that influences the customers' perceptions of value and service quality, and which consequently affects customer loyalty. In our cross-disciplinary research in human-computer interaction (HCI) and relationship marketing, we have been investigating how HCI and customer relationship management (CRM) strategies can be integrated in the design of e-commerce so as to engender customer retention, trust and loyalty. We have performed a series of empirical studies to understand customers' requirements and perceptions about service-quality from e-shopping and e-travel environments. From these studies, we have developed an empirically-grounded evaluation instrument, E-SEQUAL, which we discuss in this paper. The development team can apply it at different phases of an e-commerce development life-cycle to integrate customers' perceived dimensions of service quality into the design and evaluation of e-commerce.

One indication of the maturation of Computer Science Education as a research-based discipline is the recent emergence of several large-scale studies spanning multiple institutions. This paper examines a "family" of these multi-institutional, multi-national studies, detailing core elements and points of difference in both study design and the organization of the research team, and highlighting the costs and benefits associated with the different approaches.

No abstract available.

Abstract: This paper presents a case study of the use of a repeated single-criterion card sort with an unusually large, diverse participant group. The study, whose goal was to elicit novice programmers' knowledge of programming concepts, involved over 20 researchers from four continents and 276 participants drawn from 20 different institutions. In this paper we present the design of the study and the unexpected result that there were few discernible systematic differences in the population. The study was one of the activities of the National Science Foundation funded Bootstrapping Research in Computer Science Education project (2003).

The EPCoS project (Effective Project work in Computer Science) is working to map the range of project work practices and to generate insights into what characterises the contexts in which particular techniques are effective. In assembling a body of authentic examples, EPCoS aims to provide a resource that enables extrapolation and synthesis of new techniques. Structured resources and process models are essential tools for supporting responsiveness in the current climate of continual change: the rapid development of computer technology is demanding new range and flexibility in project work, and EPCoS's mapping of project-based teaching allows practitioners to respond to these changes. Moreover, EPCoS is examining the process by which practices are transferred between institutional contexts, with a view to identifying effective models of that process. In this paper, we describe EPCoS's work-in-progress and describe briefly how technology makes the catalogue easier to use, providing tailored access, fast selection and juxtaposition, and the potential for an extensible, updated, distributed resource.

No abstract available.

No abstract available.

This paper considers how facilities afforded by electronic assignment handling can contribute to the quality of Internet-based teaching of programming. It reports a study comparing the nature, form, and quality of feedback provided by instructors on 90 paper and electronic assignments in an introductory Computing course and notes effective strategies for electronic marking.

article Free Access Share on Evaluation: turning technology from toy to tool: report of the working group on evaluation Authors: Vicki L. Almstrum The University of Texas at Austin The University of Texas at AustinView Profile , Nell Dale The University of Texas at Austin The University of Texas at AustinView Profile , Anders Berglund Uppsala University, Sweden Uppsala University, SwedenView Profile , Mary Granger The George Washington University The George Washington UniversityView Profile , Joyce Currie Little Towson State University Towson State UniversityView Profile , Diane M. Miller University of Southern Mississippi University of Southern MississippiView Profile , Marian Petre Open University, UK Open University, UKView Profile , Paul Schragger Villanova University Villanova UniversityView Profile , Fred Springsteel University of Missouri University of MissouriView Profile Authors Info & Claims ACM SIGCSE BulletinVolume 28Issue SI1996 pp 201–217https://doi.org/10.1145/237477.237648Published:01 January 1996Publication History 22citation906DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations22Total Downloads906Last 12 Months38Last 6 weeks3 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteeReaderPDF

The Open University, which teaches around 150,000 students at a distance, is examining the adaptation of its distance teaching methods for the Internet, and its Computing Department has undertaken a sequence of trials to investigate both the technical and educational issues involved.Two smallscale trials were run in 1995, and this paper will describe their successor trials being run in 1996: 300 students on an entry-Ievel Computing course, and 50 students on an upper-level course.This paper introduces the OU'S distance teaching structure; describes the trials investigating the effect of electronic communication on students, tutors, counselors, and administrators;and discusses the infrastructure and the electronic tutorials that have been developed.The paper concludes with a list of issues which arise.

In this paper, we attempt to clarify both the terminology used to classify programming languages and the nature of the classification itself. We feel that the current terminology and classification as captured in the literature is out of balance with the way that subject programming languages are used. We consider the accessibility of the computational model and the importance of the implementation language and suggest that a re-appraisal in this context will produce a better characterisation of both the programming language styles and their labels.