Antti Knutas

Antti Knutas, Timo Hynninen, Maija Hujala

Student evaluations of teaching (SET) are commonly used in universities for assessing teaching quality. However, previous literature shows that in software engineering students tend to rate certain topics higher than others: In particular students tend to value programming and software construction over software design, software engineering models and methods, or soft skills. We hypothesize that these biases also play a role in SET responses collected from students. The objective of this study is to investigate how the topic of a software engineering course affects the SET metrics. We accomplish this by performing multilevel regression analysis on SET data collected in a software engineering programme. We analyzed a total of 1295 student evaluations from 46 university courses in a Finnish university. The results of the analysis verifies that the student course evaluations exhibit similar biases as distinguished by previous software engineering education research. The type of the course can predict a higher SET rating. In our dataset, software construction and programming courses received higher SET ratings compared to courses on software engineering processes, models, and methods.

Annika Wolff, Antti Knutas, Paula Savolainen

Finland is considered a country with a good track record in gender equality. Whilst statistics support the notion that Finland is performing well compared to many other countries in terms of workplace equality, there are still many areas for improvement. This paper focuses on the problems that some women face in obtaining software engineering roles. We report a preliminary analysis of survey data from 252 respondents. These are mainly women who have shown an interest in gaining programming roles by joining the Mimmit koodaa initiative, which aims to increase equality and diversity within the software industry. The survey sought to understand what early experiences may influence later career choices and feelings of efficacy and confidence needed to pursue technology-related careers. These initial findings reveal that women's feelings of computing self-efficacy and attitudes towards software engineering are shaped by early experiences. More negative experiences decrease the likelihood of working in software engineering roles in the future, despite expressing an interest in the field.

Antti Knutas, Jouni Ikonen, Jari Porras

Computer-supported collaborative learning (CSCL) has been a steady topic of research since the early 1990s, and the trend has continued to this date. The basic benefits of CSCL in the classroom have been established in many fields of education to improve especially student motivation and critical thinking. In this paper we present a systematic mapping study about the state of research of computer-supported collaborative learning in software engineering education. The mapping study examines published articles from 2003 to 2013 to find out how this field of science has progressed. Ongoing research topics in CSCL in software engineering education concern wider learning communities and the effectiveness of different collaborative approaches. We found that while the research establishes the benefits of CSCL in several different environments from local to global ones, these approaches are not always detailed and comparative enough to pinpoint which factors have enabled their success.

Antti Knutas, Victoria Palacin, Giovanni Maccani et al.

Civic grassroots have proven their ability to create useful and scalable software that addresses pressing social needs. Although software engineering plays a fundamental role in the process of creating civic technology, academic literature that analyses the software development processes of civic tech grassroots is scarce. This paper aims to advance the understanding of how civic grassroots tackle the different activities in their software development processes. In this study, we followed the formation of two projects in a civic tech group (Code for Ireland) seeking to understand how their development processes evolved over time, and how the group carried out their work in creating new technology. Our preliminary findings show that such groups are capable of setting up systematic software engineering processes that address software specification, development, validation, and evolution. While they were able to deliver software according to self-specified quality standards, the group has challenges in requirements specification, stakeholder engagement, and reorienting from development to product delivery. Software engineering methods and tools can effectively support the future of civic technologies and potentially improve their management, quality, and durability.