Morgan Ericsson

A Survey of Research Methods and Purposes in Mobile Learning

In this paper, the authors present a survey of published research in mobile learning. The authors investigate 114 papers from mLearn 2005, 2007, and 2008, and classify them according to two dimensions: research method and research purpose. Research methods and purposes are important parts of how research is conducted. Opinions and approaches toward research differ greatly. The classified papers are evenly distributed among the research methods investigated, with one exception, there are few in basic research. In terms of research purpose, papers that describe research are well represented but there is a lack of papers targeting evaluation. Papers recounting both basic research and research evaluation are imperative, as they help a research field to mature and researchers to avoid repeating known pitfalls. This maturity, in turn, leads to better scalability and sustainability for future research efforts in the mobile learning community.

A Metrics-Based Approach to Technical Documentation Quality

Technical documentation is now fully taking the step from stale printed booklets (or electronic versions of these) to interactive and online versions. This provides opportunities to reconsider how we define and assess the quality of technical documentation. This paper suggests an approach based on the Goal-Question-Metric paradigm: predefined quality goals are continuously assessed and visualized by the use of metrics. To test this approach, we perform two experiments. We adopt well known software analysis techniques, e.g., clone detection and test coverage analysis, and assess the quality of two real world documentations, that of a mobile phone and of (parts of) a warship. The experiments show that quality issues can be identified and that the approach is promising.

Profile-guided composition

We present an approach that generates context-aware, optimized libraries of algorithms and data structures. The search space contains all combinations of implementation variants of algorithms and data structures including dynamically switching and converting between them. Based on profiling, the best implementation for a certain context is precomputed at deployment time and selected at runtime. In our experiments, the profile-guided composition outperforms the individual variants in almost all cases.

Teaching Agile: addressing the conflict between project delivery and application of Agile methods

This paper analyses the changes we have made in teaching agile methodologies, practices, and principles in four courses in order to address a specific dilemma: students need to apply agile methods in order to learn them, but when complementing our courses with applied content, we face the problem that students perceive the learning and application of agile methods as less important than delivering a finished product at the end of the course. This causes students to not apply theoretical process knowledge and therefore to not develop necessary skills associated with working with defined processes in the industry. Concretely, we report on our experience with teaching Scrum with Lego, removing formal grading requirements on the delivered product, emphasising process application in post-mortem reports, and organisational changes to support the process during supervision. These changes are analysed in the context of student satisfaction, teacher observations, and achievements of learning outcomes. We also provide an overview of the lessons learnt to help guide the design of courses on agile methodologies.

Lookahead Scheduling for Reconfigurable GRID Systems

This paper proposes an approach to continuously optimizing parallel scientific applications with dynamically changing architectures. We achieve this by combining a dynamic architecture and lookahead malleable task graph scheduling.

Evaluation of a static architectural conformance checking method in a line of computer games

We present an evaluation of a simple method to find architectural problems in a product line of computer games. The method uses dependencies (direct, indirect, or no) to automatically classify types in the implementation to high-level components in the product line architecture. We use a commercially available tool to analyse dependencies in the source code. The automatic classification of types is compared to a manual classification by the developer, and all mismatches are reported. To evaluate the method, we inspect the source code and look for a pre-defined set of architectural problems in all types. We compare the set of types that contained problems to the set of types where the manual and automatic classification disagreed to determine precision and recall. We also investigate what changes are needed to correct the found mismatches by either designing and implementing changes in the source code or refining the automatic classification. Our evaluation shows that the simple method is effective at detecting architectural problems in a product line of four games. The method is lightweight, customisable and easy to implement early in the development cycle.

An Adaptive High-Performance Service Architecture

This paper introduces an approach to dynamic software composition in the context of scientific computing where high demands performance seem to prevent such flexible solutions. In our concrete however, dynamic software composition is rather a way to high-performance than an obstacle to it. We achieve this by combining dynamic architectures and task graph scheduling.

A Method to Test the Information Quality of Technical Documentation on Websites

In software engineering, testing is one of the corner-stones of quality assurance. The idea of software testing can be applied to information quality as well. Technical documentation has a set of intended uses that correspond to use cases in a software system. Documentation is, in many cases, presented via software systems, e.g., web servers and browsers, and contains software, e.g., Javascript for user interaction, animation, and customization, etc. This makes it difficult to find a clear-cut distinction between a software system and technical documentation. However, we can assume that each use case of a technical documentation involves retrieval of some sort of information that helps a user answer a specific questions. To assess information testing as a method, we implemented QAnalytics, a tool to assess the information quality of documentation that is provided by a website. The tool is web-based and allows test managers and site owners to define test cases and success criteria, disseminate the test cases to testers, and to analyze the test results. This way, information testing is easily manageable even for non-technical stakeholders. We applied our testing method and tool in a case study. According to common perception, the website of Linnaeus University needs to be re-engineered. Our method and tool helped the stakeholders identify what information is presented well and which parts of the website that need to change. The test results allowed the design and development effort to prioritize actual quality issues and potentially save time and resources.

A Study of the Effect of Data Normalization on Software and Information Quality Assessment

Indirect metrics in quality models define weighted integrations of direct metrics to provide higher-level quality indicators. This paper presents a case study that investigates to what degree quality models depend on statistical assumptions about the distribution of direct metrics values when these are integrated and aggregated. We vary the normalization used by the quality assessment efforts of three companies, while keeping quality models, metrics, metrics implementation and, hence, metrics values constant. We find that normalization has a considerable impact on the ranking of an artifact (such as a class). We also investigate how normalization affects the quality trend and find that normalizations have a considerable effect on quality trends. Based on these findings, we find it questionable to continue to aggregate different metrics in a quality model as we do today.

Information Quality Testing

When a new system, such as a knowledge management system or a content management system is put into production, both the software and hardware are systematically and thoroughly tested while the main purpose of the system — the information — often lacks systemic testing. In this paper we study how to extend testing approaches from software and hardware development to information engineering. We define an information quality testing procedure based on test cases, and provide tools to support testing as well as the analysis and visualization of data collected during the testing. Further, we present a feasibility study where we applied information quality testing to assess information in a documentation system. The results show promise and have been well received by the companies that participated in the feasibility study.