Shreya Kumar

Lessons from our elders: identifying obstacles to digital literacy through direct engagement

In todays world, technological change outpaces many peoples ability to comprehend or trust it, let alone embrace it. It is vitally important that developers of pervasive technology for the elderly are grounded in the needs, experience, and capabilities of the people they seek to help. We have organized and participated in an ongoing outreach program that trains elderly residents of our rural community in digital literacy skills. The attendees at our help sessions, having been left behind in earlier iterations of the technological revolution, exemplify the challenges facing the designers of tomorrows assistive technology. We report on the lessons we have learned in this regard through the interactions with our elderly participants. We identify three recurring themes: anxiety stifles exploration, details obscure abstraction, lag complicates adoption - illustrating them with real stories gleaned from our records. We offer our program as a model for engagement with the elderly, helping them overcome their obstacles to literacy and giving us researchers a non-invasive perspective on their situation.

A tale of two projects: A pattern based comparison of communication strategies in student software development

Preparing students for the communication realities of software development is as difficult as it is important. Training in specific genres of oral and written communication is vital, but successful software developers must also design their communication, choosing appropriate genres and styles to fit the audience and context. We introduce a pattern language for classifying and describing communication strategies. Communication Patterns serve both as an approach for rigorous qualitative analysis and as a library of established practices that students can draw from. The approach has clear links to software design patterns and highlights the fact that communication, like software, is a designed artifact. We focus on two software projects from our case study repository, using Communication Patterns. The two case studies have a great deal of overlap in objectives, stakeholders, responsibilities and timescales, but the outcomes are drastically different. Through patterns, we assess communication at strategic and tactical levels, and we find major differences in communication choices. We also discuss our attempts to expose students to Communication Patterns in the classroom. We conclude with a look at future efforts to deepen our pattern library and diversify our approaches to building and using them.

Teaching Human Factors to Graduate and Undergraduate Computer Science Students

Human factors (HF) is not a subject traditionally taught in the Computer Science (CS) curriculum. The traditional CS curriculum focuses on the computer (the machine) and the programs for the machine. Because the faculty was not introduced to HF in their education, studying users has no role in their discipline. Undergraduate CS students are more receptive to new ideas and consequently do not define their discipline as rigidly. Nevertheless, they typically chose to study CS because of their interest in the technology and the machines. Another challenge to introducing HF to the CS curriculum is that there is no space in the program for another course. Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) is an existing course in most CS curricula that can be leveraged to expose CS undergraduates to HF concepts. The traditional HCI course focused primarily on the technology and implementation of graphical user interfaces. Only recently has design, specifically user centered design, been taught in CS HCI courses. This paper describes combining undergraduate and graduate HCI courses that expose CS students to HF. Students in the undergraduate HCI course design and implements group projects, consisting of smart phone applications (apps), and the graduate students evaluate and test the apps. The challenges of introducing HF to CS students and principles for overcoming them are explained, along with the interactions between the undergraduate and graduate students.

Communication strategies for mentoring in software development projects

As with professionals in all engineering disciplines, software developers new to a project must be given the implicit and explicit knowledge they need to be productive, in an effective and appropriate way, due to fluid team dynamics, geographical distribution, and other factors. As part of a broader study of communication in software development, we focus here on communication strategies for mentoring. We explore some examples of mentoring-oriented communication, in an educational setting and in an open-source consortium of academics and professionals. Through further study, we plan to draw out recurring patterns of communication between mentors and protégés.

Mentoring trajectories in an evolving agile workplace

Agile approaches to software development offer flexibility and autonomy to developers, while demanding discipline and attentiveness. At its best, agile constitutes an idealized vision of Wenger’s Community of Practice: one where the essence of the software practice is freely negotiated by participants following self-determined trajectories of identity within the community. While agile frameworks prescribe ways of doing, in reality these codified practices must adapt to a real workplace. Nowhere is this more plainly seen than in the onboarding stage of new employees: this is the point where newcomers establish an identity and establish means of participating within the development community.We report on the evolving nature of onboarding and mentoring at a mature software development firm that has practiced Scrum for a decade. As the firm has scaled up to an international purveyor of specialized engineering software and services, the way in which new employees are brought into the community of practice has changed profoundly. We view this history through a series of lenses: those of workplace participants entering the firm at different stages of the firm’s history. We follow the history of the onboarding process through the perspectives of several employees, and we focus on the trajectories of certain key employees as their roles change from novice to mentor.

Communication patterns: a tool for analyzing communication in emerging computer science educational practices (abstract only)

We introduce Communication Patterns (CPs) as a tool for rigorous qualitative analysis of project communication. Using our library of student capstone project case studies as a test bed, we describe our approach to communication analysis. We identify, analyze and compare the communication, at various granularities, that takes place in student projects. The patterns allow us to objectively describe the structure (what, how, who, where, when, why) of the different forms of communication that occur in a software project. Patterns range from strategic (choice of genre) to tactical (wording or tone). We use CPs to sensitize students to their communication choices as developers and users. The CP framework is familiar to students (akin to design patterns) and generative (readily extendible to new scenarios). In addition, we as researchers and instructors plan to use CPs to assess how new pedagogical practices, moving from traditional classroom communication towards more blended learning, are changing the student experience and assess the effectiveness of current software project communication practices. We use CPs to analyze the communication that occurs in teaching computer use to novice senior citizens. The examples illustrate how CPs can be used to study communication practices in many different contexts of software development or use.

Agile Communicators: Cognitive Apprenticeship to Prepare Students for Communication-Intensive Software Development

We report on our efforts to enhance our undergraduate computer science and software engineering curriculum, promoting what we term agile communication through practice in inquiry, critique and reflection. We are targeting early courses in our curriculum, so that students internalize agile practices as part of their personal software development process. Our approach constitutes a cognitive apprenticeship that engages students in authentic software settings and articulates processes that are traditionally left implicit. Communication-intensive activities are woven through this curriculum in a variety of ways. The POGIL framework provides a structured approach to inquiry. Automated feedback on test coverage, programming style and code documentation are provided through WebTA, a novel tool that we have integrated into the Canvas learning management system, providing communication by proxy that supplements instructor feedback with continual critique of code and documentation. A program of guided inquiry through real case studies of software communication prepares students for their team software activities, and a series of reflective exercises leads them to focus on their own team communication practices.

Patterns of inquiry in computer literacy help sessions for the elderly

The worldwide demographic shift toward an aging population in developed countries highlights the need for more technology-based assistance for the elderly. The success of any assistive technology system depends on motivated, literate users; hence it is important to study how elder users learn and what their motivations for learning technology are. Our volunteer computer literacy sessions at the local library are a rich source of communication, providing insights into the learning process for elders. Using a small sample of these conversations, we apply a communication pattern language to qualitatively analyze the communication strategies and tactics that tutors and learners use. We are able to shed light on the patterns of learning technology use for elder users, to be able employ those principles in system design

Guidance for exploratory testing through problem frames

Exploratory testing is a well-established, industry-adopted process of investigation and discovery, which employs human creativity to gain deep insights into a software product. It is authentic, rigorous, and enjoyable, making it an excellent topic for an undergraduate software engineering course. However, it is difficult to explain to the beginner how to generate a successful exploratory strategy. “Case studies” and “lessons learned” from practitioners illustrate the value of exploratory testing but do not necessarily reveal the motivation for a particular exploratory tour. Here we discuss the use of problem frames as a means of guiding students toward promising testing strategies. Problem frames were originally proposed as a requirements analysis approach, carefully locating and bounding software problems to be solved, then matching subproblems to commonly occurring problem patterns or “frames”. A natural extension to that idea is to associate test strategies with particular frame concerns, guiding the student toward exploratory techniques that are well-suited to the frame. Once students become confident exploratory testers, they can add their own strategies to a growing body of knowledge. To illustrate the approach, we consider frame concerns and test strategies for workpieces problems, using Google Calendar as our test subject.

Among the agilists: participant observation in a rapidly evolving workplace

In this paper, we describe the practical considerations and challenges of studying an agile, co-located software development community by assimilating among them over many months. We have adopted a fully immersive ethnographic approach using semistructured and unstructured interviews. In many ways, the design choices in our study mirrored those faced by the development team, as we adjusted our methods on the y to accommodate our richer knowledge of the work environment and adapted to changes on the ground. We share our process of determining and adjusting an operating procedure for the ethnographic observation and we reflect on the challenges faced in choosing subjects to study, getting them on board, planning questions and conducting interviews without disrupting the regular process of software development.