Timo Lehtonen

On the role of gamification and localization in an open online learning environment: javala experiences

Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have rapidly become an important tool for educational institutes in teaching programming. Nevertheless, high drop-out rates have always been a problem in online learning. As MOOCs have become an important part of modern education, reducing the drop-out rate has become a more and more relevant research problem. This work studies a nine-year-long period of maintaining an open, online learning environment of programming. The aim is to find out how the implementation of the learning environment could engage the students to learning and this way affect the drop-out rate. We provide an insight to experiences stemming from nine years of data collected with Javala, an online system created to help shifting from C++ to Java programming. The paper also discusses two key properties of Javala, gamification, and localization, together with data to assess their significance.

Visualizations as a Basis for Agile Software Process Improvement

Software projects have usually a lot of software engineering data available in different kinds of repositories. This data can be mined and used for software process improvement purposes. In general, agile methodologies emphasize reflection, making problems visible, and learning from the past. As the human mind is powerful in interpreting visual representations, visualizations could help in recognizing problems and areas of improvement in an agile software development process. In this paper an action research approach was taken to carry out software process improvement in an industry project. The research resulted in a visualization of the issue management systems data. The visualizations were a tool to identify problems in the development process and to make them visible for all stakeholders. The results show that this kind of visual approach can be used successfully to point out problems in the process. The visualizations form a basis for communication on possible software process improvement.

Decision-making framework for refactoring

Refactoring has been defined as improving code quality without affecting its functionality. When refactoring is overlooked in daily development, the likelihood of larger refactorings increases with time. Disadvantages of larger refactorings include that they disrupt the daily work, require additional planning effort, and often they need to be justified to stakeholders. In this paper, we investigate with interviews how professionals make refactoring decisions. As a result, we present a framework for decision making for larger refactoring operations describing the key stages in a refactoring workflow. Furthermore, one actual industry case of refactoring decision making is presented in detail.

Perceived Benefits of Adopting Continuous Delivery Practices

Context: In continuous delivery, the aim is that every feature passes through the integration and deployment pipeline, resulting in an immediately deployable product. This practice has been proposed to accelerate value delivery, improve software quality and increase developer productivity. Goal: We investigate the adoption of continuous delivery practices and evaluate the related benefits in a single customer-supplier organization. We focus on the perceived benefits of supplier and customer organizations during a five-year transition period. Method: We performed an exploratory case study. We used semi-structured interviews and thematic analysis. Results: Increased communication and collaboration between developers and customer was perceived as one of the core benefits. Other reported benefits were increased productivity, improved product quality, improved developer morale as well as infrastructural independence and organizational agnosticism. Conclusions: The results indicate that the adoption of continuous software engineering practices bring various benefits for both customers and developers, beyond mere increased pace of production deployments.

Exploring Peopleware in Continuous Delivery

Traditionally, releasing new software has been a fragile and painful procedure. This view has been challenged by a new approach to software deployment, where the goal is to always be able to deploy the system. The transition from manual releases to instant deployments requires a high degree of automation. Furthermore, the transition requires a new mindset, where both developers and operators act together to deliver value to end users. As this process involves humans and cooperation, developers and their attitude towards the new way of working is important. To this end, in this paper we study the developer perspective of applying continuous delivery in the light of interviewing practitioners working for projects where continuous delivery practices are applied. More precisely, we place the focus on how continuous delivery practices affect software developers and what are the prerequisites for achieving continuous delivery. Based on our research, higher quality and other benefits of continuous delivery can be achieved by giving developers more responsibility. Still, the added responsibilities do not necessarily increase stress, but can actually decrease it, and at the same time improve motivation and job satisfaction.

Continuous, Lean, and Wasteless: Minimizing Lead Time from Development Done to Production Use

Modern software organizations invest substantial effort in building and automating their tool chain. The goal is to maximize both the speed of development, and how rapidly new software is deployed. This paper presents results from a descriptive and exploratory single case study from an ongoing project of Finnish company Solita. Based on data from version control and production logs, we investigate the feature flow in the project to study the effect of lean processes and the continuous deployment tool chain to waste produced by the deployment pipeline. We find that flow efficiency can be improved simply by minimizing the idle time the feature waits in the production process after its implementation has been finalized. This reduction of waste benefits both end users and developers - the users get access to new features, and the developers receive timely feedback.