Igor Čavrak

Customers' Role in Teaching Distributed Software Development

This paper describes different aspects of teaching distributed software development, regarding the types of project customers: industry and academia. These approaches enable students to be more engaged in real-world situations, by having customers from the industry, local or distributed customers in universities, distributed customers in software engineering contests or being involved in an ongoing project, thus simulating the company merging. The methods we describe are used in a distributed project-oriented course, which is jointly carried out by two universities from Sweden and Croatia. The paper presents our experiences of such projects being done during the course, the differences in each approach, issues observed and ways to solve them, in order to create a more engaging education for better-prepared engineers of tomorrow.

Avoiding scylla and charybdis in distributed software development course

Teaching Distributed Software Development (DSD) is a challenging task. A convincing simulation of distributed environment in a local environment is practically impossible. Teaching DSD in distributed environment is more realistic since the students directly experience all its specifics. However, teaching in distributed environment, in which several geographically separated teams participate, is very demanding. Different types of obstacles occur, from administrative and organizational to technical ones. This paper describes some of the challenges, lessons learned, but also success stories of the DSD course performed now eight year in a row.

Collaboration patterns in distributed software development projects

The need for educating future software engineers in the field of global software engineering is recognized by many educational institutions. In this paper we outline the characteristics of an existing global software development course run over a period of nine years, and present a flexible project framework for conducting student projects in a distributed environment. Based on data collected from fourteen distributed student projects, a set of collaboration patterns is identified and their causes and implications described. Collaboration patterns are a result of the analysis of collaboration links within distributed student teams, and can assist teachers in better understanding of the dynamics found in distributed projects.

Student motivation in distributed software development projects

In this paper we discuss challenges faced in conducting distributed student projects within a scope of a distributed software development university course. Student motivation and demotivation factors, along with perceived cultural differences, are identified and analyzed on the basis of data collected from a number of student projects.

Architecture of an interoperable IoT platform based on microservices

The vision of the Internet of Things enabled the development of a wide spectrum of services, applications and ecosystems, deemed infeasible not long ago. However, lack of standardization poses a number of questions still requiring proper addressing. Due to the need of supporting large number of users and significant data processing throughput, Internet of Things requires a specific approach towards the problem of providing sufficient scalability and performance, clearly pointing towards the distribution of effort among a large number of small and specialized services. Reflecting on the importance of coexistence of heterogeneous systems supporting the Internet of Things, this paper presents an overview of the specific problems inherent to the IoT and the proposal of an architecture of a microservice based middleware aimed at connecting heterogeneous IoT devices. The middleware functionality is achieved irrespective of the size and complexity of a given device network, both from the data model aspect and from the aspect of connecting existing and newly created middleware components.

Multi-dimensional assessment of risks in a distributed software development course

The organizational shift from local to global settings in many software development initiatives has triggered the need for entailing it when educating the future software engineers. Several educational institutions have embraced this need and started collaborating for the provision of global software engineering courses. The rather complex nature of such courses results in a wider range of risks, in comparison to standard software engineering courses, that arise in different dimensions, ranging from course-to result-related, and for different reasons. In this work we provide an assessment of such a variety of risks as well as their causes, and we give a hint on how they may affect each other based on our 10-year-long experience with a tightly integrated GSD course.

CORBA-based remote instrumentation

Fast development in two of the most important technologies used in our proposal led to a new implementation of the concept of remote instrument access over public computer networks. As CORBA (Common Object Request Broker Architecture) is emerging into a widespread technology for interconnection of distributed objects our aim was to investigate its applicability on remote instrument access, at the same time trying to reduce implementation complexity as much as possible. The second key technology previously used in our proposal, the Java programming language, is gradually maturing and gaining necessary functionality to be used in more complex applications. Our focus in this paper is on using JavaBeans components both for flexible remote instrument access and, at the same time, for visual programming in various GUI-based application/applet development tools.

Introducing SCRUM into a Distributed Software Development Course

The growing enactment of Global Software Engineering in industry has triggered educational institutions to perceive the importance of preparing students for distributed software development. During the last twelve years we have disclosed advantages and pitfalls of GSE to our students through our Distributed Software Development course. After running the projects according to the iterative process model for eleven years, we decided to shift to an agile development model, SCRUM. This decision was due to the growing industrial adoption of agile methods, but more importantly to increase proactiveness, sense of responsibility, and to balance the workload among the project team members. In this paper we describe the process and outcomes of our first attempt at introducing SCRUM in our distributed course.

GENESIS: a framework for global engineering of embedded systems

GENESIS is an European initiative involving institutions and persons from older and new EU members, and West Balkan countries. It aims at developing a global network of research and education in embedded systems. The related research will be coordinated in such a way to address hot topics at European and global levels and will concentrate on the fusion of embedded systems and distributed services over the Internet. One of the main objectives of GENESIS is to develop a distributed virtual laboratory to be used in embedded systems research and education and this is described in detail. This paper presents the rationale behind this initiative and the main actions that are proposed to fulfill the educational, and scientific objectives of GENESIS.

An artificial immune system approach to news article recommendation

Artificial immune systems are solution finding techniques often used for classification and recommendation problems. Danger theory is one of new context dependant response theories of how an artificial immune system responds to pathogens. News articles recommendation systems solve problems of presenting articles with interesting topics to user honoring evolving user preferences and past choices. This paper describes how artificial immune system with Danger theory can be utilized for news articles recommendation on Web portals or similar media presenter systems and presents algorithm and method for handling user preferences and article features in recommender system.