Thomas Kowark

How surveys, tutors, and software help to assess Scrum adoption in a classroom software engineering project

Agile methods are best taught in a hands-on fashion in realistic projects. The main challenge in doing so is to assess whether students apply the methods correctly without requiring complete supervision throughout the entire project. This paper presents experiences from a classroom project where 38 students developed a single system using a scaled version of Scrum. Surveys helped us to identify which elements of Scrum correlated most with student satisfaction or posed the biggest challenges. These insights were augmented by a team of tutors, which accompanied main meetings throughout the project to provide feedback to the teams, and captured impressions of method application in practice. Finally, we performed a post-hoc, tool-supported analysis of collaboration artifacts to detect concrete indicators for anti-patterns in Scrum adoption. Through the combination of these techniques we were able to understand how students implemented Scrum in this course and which elements require further lecturing and tutoring in future iterations. Automated analysis of collaboration artifacts proved to be a promising addition to the development process that could potentially reduce manual efforts in future courses and allow for more concrete and targeted feedback, as well as more objective assessment.

An Instrument for Real-Time Design Interaction Capture and Analysis

How do designers leverage information and communication technology to collaborate with team partners and other process participants? Given the increasingly complex, distributed, and virtual setups of design environments and processes, answering this question is challenging. At HPI, we have developed computational data collection and analysis techniques to improve the efficiency and range of observations in technology-enabled design spaces. Using our software, we were able to capture and evaluate complex characteristics of online interactions in distributed design teams at quasi real-time. Besides new insights into the communication behavior of design teams, it could be demonstrated that communication activity signatures of high-performance design teams are significantly different than those of low-performance teams. The combination of new techniques along with quantifiable performance metrics provides a stable foundation for real-time design team diagnostics.

An Educational Testbed for the Computational Analysis of Collaboration in Early Stages of Software Development Processes

Agile software development processes are widely adopted in software engineering projects. Their low organizational overhead and iterative nature make them ideal choices for small development teams. The application of those methods in software projects that require collaboration between multiple sub-teams is a challenging task that remains subject to intensive research. Especially the initial phases of such projects are crucial for project success since a problem-free inception period generates a basis for efficient development later in the process. We introduce a testbed that allows analyzing collaboration processes during those early stages of software development within a low-risk, educational setup. Participants of a software engineering lecture form development teams of considerable size and develop real-life applications in a realistic, yet controlled, environment. By combining manual observations with the computational analysis of digital collaboration artifacts we are able to gain insights into distinctive patterns of collaboration activity and reason about their triggers within the process setup.

Object-relational mapping with SqueakSave

Object persistence is an important aspect of application architectures and development processes. Different solutions in this field evolved over the last decades and new approaches are still subject to research. While object-oriented databases become increasingly popular, the usage of relational databases through an object-relational mapping layer is still one of the most widely adopted techniques. However, most object-relational frameworks require a considerable amount of mapping descriptions between object models and relational database schemas. This additional layer has to be maintained by developers along with the object model itself. In this paper, we present an approach to object-relational mapping that utilizes the introspection and intercession features of Smalltalk to free developers from manually creating those mapping descriptions. The presented framework analyzes the existing models and automatically deduces suitable database schemas. Thus, it aids development processes by neglecting the need for a separate mapping layer. A detailed introduction of the programming interface is followed by a description of the frameworks internal implementation details. Additionally, the performance of the framework is evaluated through a comparison against a comparable system for the same programming environment.

DT@Scrum: Integrating Design Thinking with Software Development Processes

Design Thinking has shown its potential for generating innovative, user-centered concepts in various projects at d.schools, in innovation courses like ME310, used by design consultancies like IDEO, and recently even in projects at large companies. However, if Design Thinking activities are not properly integrated with production processes, e.g. software development, handovers become necessary and potentially prevent great ideas from becoming real products.

Agile metrics for a university software engineering course

Teaching agile software development by pairing lectures with hands-on projects has become the norm. This approach poses the problem of grading and evaluating practical project work as well as process conformance during development. Yet, few best practices exist for measuring the success of students in implementing agile practices. Most university courses rely on observations during the course or final oral exams. In this paper, we propose a set of metrics which give insights into the adherence to agile practices in teams. The metrics identify instances in development data, e.g. commits or user stories, where agile processes were not followed. The identified violations can serve as starting points for further investigation and team discussions. With contextual knowledge of the violation, the executed process or the metric itself can be refined. The metrics reflect our experiences with running a software engineering course over the last five years. They measure aspects which students frequently have issues with and that diminish process adoption and student engagement. We present the proposed metrics, which were tested in the latest course installment, alongside tutoring, lectures, and oral exams.

A Research Plan for the Integration of Design Thinking with Large Scale Software Development Projects

Design Thinking and agile software development processes are both widely adopted by innovative companies that try to create products with maximum end user value. Usually, the adopting companies work in smaller teams that tackle projects of manageable size, but huge companies are increasingly trying to adopt these methods in their large-scale projects as well. The main impediments for the adoption of the aforementioned methods in such settings are the strict requirements which, for example, enterprise software vendors have to fulfill. The need for complying with a plethora of mandatory product standards and providing comprehensive documentation of the development processes is not integrated naturally into the methodologies and, hence, tend to weaken their innovative potential. This chapter outlines our research agenda for a process model that combines agile software development processes, such as Scrum or Extreme Programming, with Design Thinking activities, while trying to maintain compliance with the previously mentioned product and process standards. Our initial process model is based on a series of expert interviews with people that previously applied Design Thinking in large companies, as well as on a thorough review of related work about similar approaches. We will further outline our evaluation process. This centers on a project-based university course that transfers the idea of Stanford’s ME310 to a computer-science-only setting. Investigating the teams’ virtual collaboration activities, but also using traditional research methods, such as questionnaires and interviews, helps us to continuously improve our process model and prepare it for future test-runs within large partner companies.

Towards a Shared Platform for Virtual Collaboration Monitoring in Design Research

Prior applications of a system to monitor IT-mediated communication activities of design teams provided new insights into the collaboration behavior during the early phases of concept creation and prototyping. We now take our approach to the next level by sketching an architecture for a platform that aims to establish ‘out- of-the-box’ monitoring capabilities for virtual team environments and to facilitate the sharing and evaluation of recorded activities within a larger research community. To further demonstrate the flexibility and applicability of our instrument, we present results and experiences gained from a recently conducted observation of software engineering teams. Our vision is a common service for capturing and analyzing virtual collaboration activities that promotes comparative research and team diagnostics in engineering design.

Towards a shared repository for patterns in virtual team collaboration

The way teams use virtual collaboration tools, such as wikis, email systems, social networks, or version control systems can provide indicators for the success or failure of projects. We previously created a platform that allows to collect and analyze these virtual collaboration activities during project runtime in a non-interfering manner. In this paper, we provide a formal definition of collaboration patterns to enable sharing of beneficial or detrimental collaboration behavior amongst scientist and practitioners. We further define a mapping from collaboration pattern descriptions to SPARQL queries that allows to automatically test other projects for occurrences of the described behavior. By that, we provide a research tool that is able to stimulate relevant and rigorous findings in empirical engineering research and lead to the creation of a shared repository of patterns that reflect best practices in virtual team collaboration.

Incremental, Per-Query Ontology Matching with RepMine

Ontology matching enables applications, such as automated data transformation or query rewriting. As it requires domain knowledge, it needs to be carried out by expert users, whose time is scarce and, therefore, should be used efficiently. To this end, the RepMine system presented in this paper does not treat ontology matching as a task of its own, but integrates it into a semi-automated query translation process. By that, users perform a task with immediate benefit for them and simultaneously contribute to alignments between ontologies. Furthermore, the overall task of matching two ontologies is split on a per-query basis and, thus, can be performed incrementally by all system users