In industry as well as education as well as academics we see a growing need for knowledge on how to apply machine learning in software applications. With the educational programme ICT & AI at Fontys UAS we had to find an answer to the question: "How should we educate software engineers to become AI engineers?" This paper describes our educational programme, the open source tools we use, and the literature it is based on. After three years of experience, we present our lessons learned for both educational institutions and software engineers in practice.
Time is one of the most important factors dominating agile software development processes in distributed settings. Effective time management helps agile teams to plan and monitor the work to be performed, and create and maintain a fast yet sustainable pace. The Pomodoro Technique is one promising time management technique. Its application and adaptation in Sourcesense Milan Team surfaced various benefits, challenges and implications for distributed agile software development. Lessons learnt from the experiences of Sourcesense Milan Team can be useful for other distributed agile teams to turn t…
As we develop more assistive and automated game design systems, the question of how these systems should be integrated into game development workflows, and how much adaptation may be required, becomes increasingly important. In this paper we explore the impact of software engineering decisions on the ability of an automated game design system to understand a game's codebase, generate new game code, and evaluate its work. We argue that a new approach to software engineering may be required in order for game developers to fully benefit from automated game designers.
Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iasi（亚历山德鲁·伊万·库扎大学）
This systematic literature review aims to investigate the impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on the labour force in software engineering, with a particular focus on the skills needed for future software engineers, the impact of AI on the demand for software engineering skills, and the future of work for software engineers. The review identified 42 relevant publications through a comprehensive search strategy and analysed their findings. The results indicate that future software engineers will need to be competent in programming and have soft skills such as problem-solving and interpersonal…
The development of scientific software is often a partnership between domain scientists and scientific software engineers. It is especially important to embrace these collaborations when developing advanced scientific software, where sustainability, reproducibility, and extensibility are important. In the ideal case, as discussed in this manuscript, this brings together teams composed of the world's foremost scientific experts in a given field with seasoned software developers experienced in forming highly collaborative teams working on software to further scientific research.
Software Engineering as an industry is highly diverse in terms of development methods and practices. Practitioners employ a myriad of methods and tend to further tailor them by e.g. omitting some practices or rules. This diversity in development methods poses a challenge for software engineering education, creating a gap between education and industry. General theories such as the Essence Theory of Software Engineering can help bridge this gap by presenting software engineering students with higher-level frameworks upon which to build an understanding of software engineering methods and practi…
The Continuous software engineering is a collaborative software development environment which offers the continues development and deployment of quality software project within short time. The Continuous software engineering practices are not yet mature enough, and the software organizations hesitate to adopt it. This study aims: (1) to explore the Continuous software engineering challenges by conducting systematic literature review (SLR) and to get the insight of industry experts via questionnaire survey study; (2) to prioritize the investigated challenges using fuzzy analytical hierarchy pro…
We are research software engineers and team members in the Department of Software Engineering and Research at Sandia National Laboratories, an organization which aims to advance software engineering in the domain of computational science. Our team hopes to promote processes and principles that lead to quality, rigor, correctness, and repeatability in the implementation of algorithms and applications in scientific software for high consequence applications. We use our experience to argue that there is a readily achievable set of software tools and best practices with a large return on investmen…
Digital transformation is a hot topic in the current global environment as a large number of organizations have been working to adopt digital solutions. Software engineering has also emerged to be a more important role as a large number of systems, either traditional or smart, are dependent on the software that collects, store, and process data. The role of software engineers has also become crucial in digital transformation. In this regard, this paper aims to examine the trends of software engineering and the role of software engineers in digital transformation. In addition to this, this pape…
Studies related to human aspects in software engineering (SE) have been performed from different perspectives. These perspectives include the study of human factors in different phases of software life cycle, effect of team performance in software development, how can a personality trait suit a particular task, and about some other miscellaneous issues. This research work aims to establish personality profiles of Pakistani software engineers using the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) instrument. In this survey, we have collected personality profiles of 110 software engineers. Moreover, their…
Context: Understanding the types of software engineering practices and techniques used in the industry is important. There is a wide spectrum in terms of the types and maturity of software engineering practices conducted in each software team and company. To characterize the type of software engineering practices conducted in software firms, a variety of surveys have been conducted in different countries and regions. Turkey has a vibrant software industry and it is important to characterize and understand the state of software engineering practices in this industry. Objective: Our objective is…
Software engineering has long studied how software developers work, building a body of work which forms the foundation of many software engineering best practices, tools, and theories. Recently, some developers have begun recording videos of themselves engaged in programming tasks contributing to open source projects, enabling them to share knowledge and socialize with other developers. We believe that these videos offer an important opportunity for both software engineering research and education. In this paper, we discuss the potential use of these videos as well as open questions for how to…
For software development companies, one of the most important objectives is to identify and acquire talented software engineers in order to maintain a skilled team that can produce competitive products. Traditional approaches for finding talented young software engineers are mainly through programming contests of various forms which mostly test participants' programming skills. However, successful software engineering in practice requires a wider range of skills from team members including analysis, design, programming, testing, communication, collaboration, and self-management, etc. In this p…
Based on the old but famous distinction between "in the small" and "in the large" software development, at Nancy Université, UHP Nancy 1, we experience for a while software engineering education thanks to actual project engineering. This education method has the merit to enable students to discover and to overcome actual problems when faced to a large project which may be conducted by a large development team. The mode of education is a simulation of an actual software engineering project as encountered in "real lifeé" activities.
Research software is a class of software developed to support research. Today a wealth of such software is created daily in universities, government, and commercial research enterprises worldwide. The sustainability of this software faces particular challenges due, at least in part, to the type of people who develop it. These Research Software Engineers (RSEs) face challenges in developing and sustaining software that differ from those faced by the developers of traditional software. As a result, professional associations have begun to provide support, advocacy, and resources for RSEs. These b…
As a newly designated professional title, research software engineers (RSEs) link the two worlds of software engineering and research science. They lack clear development and training opportunities, particularly in the realm of mentoring. In this paper, we discuss mentorship as it pertains to the unique needs of RSEs and propose ways in which organizations and institutions can support mentor/mentee relationships for RSEs
We have been thinking about other aspects of software engineering for many years; the missing link in engineering software is the soft skills set, essential in the software development process. Although soft skills are among the most important aspects in the creation of software, they are often overlooked by educators and practitioners. One of the main reasons for the oversight is that soft skills are usually related to social and personality factors, i.e., teamwork, motivation, commitment, leadership, multi-culturalism, emotions, interpersonal skills, etc. This editorial is a manifesto declar…
Background: Assessing and communicating software engineering research can be challenging. Design science is recognized as an appropriate research paradigm for applied research but is seldom referred to in software engineering. Applying the design science lens to software engineering research may improve the assessment and communication of research contributions. Aim: The aim of this study is 1) to understand whether the design science lens helps summarize and assess software engineering research contributions, and 2) to characterize different types of design science contributions in the softwa…
The software ecosystem is a trust-rich part of the world. Collaboratively, software engineers trust major hubs in the ecosystem, such as package managers, repository services, and programming language ecosystems. This trust, however, is often broken by vulnerabilities, ransomware, and abuse from malignant actors. But what is trust? In this paper we explore, through twelve in-depth interviews with software engineers, how they perceive trust in their daily work. From the interviews we conclude three things. First, software engineers make a distinction between an adoption factor and a trust facto…
According to different reports, many recent software engineering graduates often face difficulties when beginning their professional careers, due to misalignment of the skills learnt in their university education with what is needed in industry. To address that need, many studies have been conducted to align software engineering education with industry needs. To synthesize that body of knowledge, we present in this paper a systematic literature review (SLR) which summarizes the findings of 33 studies in this area. By doing a meta-analysis of all those studies and using data from 12 countries a…
Integrating Human-Centric Approaches into Undergraduate Software Engineering Education: A Scoping Review and Curriculum Analysis in the Australian Context
Software startups continue to be important drivers of economy globally. As the initial investment required to found a new software company becomes smaller and smaller resulting from technological advances such as cloud technology, increasing numbers of new software startups are born. Typically, the main argument for studying software startups is that they differ from mature software organizations in various ways, thus making the findings of many existing studies not directly applicable to them. How, exactly, software startups really differ from other types of software organizations as an on-go…
Effects of personality profiles and human factors in software engineering (SE) have been studied from different perspectives, such as: software life cycle, team performance, software quality attributes, and so on. This study intends to compare personality profiles of software engineers in academia and industry. In this survey we have collected personality profiles of software engineers from academia and the local industry in Pakistan. According to the Myers- Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) instrument, the most prominent personality type among Pakistani academicians is a combination of Introversio…
Formal methods for software correctness are critical to the future of software engineering - and so must be an essential part of software engineering education. Unfortunately, formal methods are often resisted by students due to perceived difficulty, mathematicity, and practical irrelevance. We redeveloped our software correctness course by taking a programming intensive approach, using the solver-aided language Dafny to provide instant formative feedback via automated assessment. Our redeveloped course increased student retention and resulted in the best evaluation for the course for at least…
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, California Institute of Technology（喷气推进实验室，加州理工学院）；Robert Bosch Corporate Research（罗伯特·博世企业研究院）；Waymo；XITASO GmbH（XITASO有限公司）；Mälardalen University（梅拉达伦大学）；Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam（阿姆斯特丹自由大学）；University of Stuttgart（斯图加特大学）
Robotics software is pushing the limits of software engineering practice. The 3rd International Workshop on Robotics Software Engineering held a panel on "the best practices for robotic software engineering". This article shares the key takeaways that emerged from the discussion among the panelists and the workshop, ranging from architecting practices at the NASA/Caltech Jet Propulsion Laboratory, model-driven development at Bosch, development and testing of autonomous driving systems at Waymo, and testing of robotics software at XITASO. Researchers and practitioners can build on the contents …
Software is a key component of solutions for 21st Century problems. These problems are often "wicked", complex, and unpredictable. To provide the best possible solution, millennial software engineers must be prepared to make ethical decisions, thinking critically, and acting systematically. This reality demands continuous changes in educational systems and curricula delivery, as misjudgment might have serious social impact. This study aims to investigate and reflect on Software Engineering (SE) Programs, proposing a conceptual framework for analyzing cyberethics education and a set of suggesti…
Software is now a vital scientific instrument, providing the tools for data collection and analysis across disciplines from bioinformatics and computational physics, to the humanities. The software used in research is often home-grown and bespoke: it is constructed for a particular project, and rarely maintained beyond this, leading to rapid decay, and frequent `reinvention of the wheel'. Understanding how to develop sustainable research software, such that it is suitable for future reuse, is therefore of interest to both researchers and funders, but how to achieve this remains an open questio…
We assert that it is the ethical duty of software engineers to strive to reduce software discrimination. This paper discusses how that might be done. This is an important topic since machine learning software is increasingly being used to make decisions that affect people's lives. Potentially, the application of that software will result in fairer decisions because (unlike humans) machine learning software is not biased. However, recent results show that the software within many data mining packages exhibits "group discrimination"; i.e. their decisions are inappropriately affected by "protecte…
This article provides a personal perspective on research in Automated Quantum Software Engineering (AQSE). It elucidates the motivation to research AQSE (why?), a precise description of such a framework (what?), and reflections on components that are required for implementing it (how?).
Understanding what a software engineer (a developer, an incident responder, a production engineer, etc.) is working on is a challenging problem -- especially when considering the more complex software engineering workflows in software-intensive organizations: i) engineers rely on a multitude (perhaps hundreds) of loosely integrated tools; ii) engineers engage in concurrent and relatively long running workflows; ii) infrastructure (such as logging) is not fully aware of work items; iv) engineering processes (e.g., for incident response) are not explicitly modeled. In this paper, we explain the …
In this paper we present a graphical programming framework, LabVIEW, and associated language and libraries, as well as programming techniques and patterns that we have found useful in making FPGAs accessible to scientists and engineers as domain expert software programmers.
