| 1. |
- Bradley, Steven, et al.
(författare)
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A Methodology for Investigating Women's Module Choices in Computer Science
- 2023
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Ingår i: ITiCSE 2023. - : Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). - 9798400701399 ; , s. 569-570
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- At ITiCSE 2021, Working Group 3 examined the evidence for teaching practices that broaden participation for women in computing, based on the National Center for Women & Information Technology (NCWIT) Engagement Practices framework. One of the report's recommendations was "Make connections from computing to your students' lives and interests (Make it Matter) but don't assume you know what those interests are; find out!" The goal of this 2023 working group is to find out what interests women students by bringing together data from our institutions on undergraduate module enrollment, seeing how they differ for women and men, and what drives those choices. We will code published module content based on ACM curriculum guidelines and combine these data to build a hierarchical statistical model of factors affecting student choice. This model should be able to tell us how interesting or valuable different topics are to women, and to what extent topic affects choice of module - as opposed to other factors such as the instructor, the timetable, or the mode of assessment. Equipped with this knowledge we can advise departments how to focus curriculum development on areas that are of value to women, and hence work towards making the discipline more inclusive.
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| 2. |
- Bradley, Steven, et al.
(författare)
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Modeling Women's Elective Choices in Computing
- 2023
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Ingår i: ITiCSE-WGR '23. - : Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). - 9798400704055 ; , s. 196-226
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Evidence-based strategies suggest ways to reduce the gender gap in computing. For example, elective classes are valuable in enabling students to choose in which directions to expand their computing knowledge in areas aligned with their interests. The availability of electives of interest may also make computing programs of study more meaningful to women. However, research on which elective computing topics are more appealing to women is often class or institution specific. In this study, we investigate differences in enrollment within undergraduate-level elective classes in computing to study differences between women and men. The study combined data from nine institutions from both Western Europe and North America and included 272 different classes with 49,710 student enrollments. These classes were encoded using ACM curriculum guidelines and combined with the enrollment data to build a hierarchical statistical model of factors affecting student choice. Our model shows which elective topics are less popular with all students (including fundamentals of programming languages and parallel and distributed computing), and which elective topics are more popular with women students (including mathematical and statistical foundations, human computer interaction and society, ethics, and professionalism). Understanding which classes appeal to different students can help departments gain insight of student choices and develop programs accordingly. Additionally, these choices can also help departments explore whether some students are less likely to choose certain classes than others, indicating potential barriers to participation in computing.
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| 3. |
- Börstler, Jürgen, 1960-, et al.
(författare)
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Developers talking about code quality
- 2023
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Ingår i: Empirical Software Engineering. - : Springer. - 1382-3256 .- 1573-7616. ; 28:6
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- There are many aspects of code quality, some of which are difficult to capture or to measure. Despite the importance of software quality, there is a lack of commonly accepted measures or indicators for code quality that can be linked to quality attributes. We investigate software developers’ perceptions of source code quality and the practices they recommend to achieve these qualities. We analyze data from semi-structured interviews with 34 professional software developers, programming teachers and students from Europe and the U.S. For the interviews, participants were asked to bring code examples to exemplify what they consider good and bad code, respectively. Readability and structure were used most commonly as defining properties for quality code. Together with documentation, they were also suggested as the most common target properties for quality improvement. When discussing actual code, developers focused on structure, comprehensibility and readability as quality properties. When analyzing relationships between properties, the most commonly talked about target property was comprehensibility. Documentation, structure and readability were named most frequently as source properties to achieve good comprehensibility. Some of the most important source code properties contributing to code quality as perceived by developers lack clear definitions and are difficult to capture. More research is therefore necessary to measure the structure, comprehensibility and readability of code in ways that matter for developers and to relate these measures of code structure, comprehensibility and readability to common software quality attributes.
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| 4. |
- Börstler, Jürgen, et al.
(författare)
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I know it when I see it : Perceptions of Code Quality ITiCSE'17 Working Group Report
- 2017
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Ingår i: ITICSE-WGR'17: PROCEEDINGS OF THE 2017 ITICSE CONFERENCE WORKING GROUP REPORTS. - New York, NY, USA : ACM Digital Library. - 9781450347044 ; , s. 70-85
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Context. Code quality is a key issue in software development. The ability to develop high quality software is therefore a key learning goal of computing programs. However, there are no universally accepted measures to assess the quality of code and current standards are considered weak. Furthermore, there are many facets to code quality. Defining and explaining the concept of code quality is therefore a challenge faced by many educators.Objectives. In this working group, we investigated code quality as perceived by students, educators, and professional developers, in particular, the differences in their views of code quality and which quality aspects they consider as more or less important. Furthermore, we investigated their sources for information about code quality and its assessment.Methods. We interviewed 34 students, educators and professional developers regarding their perceptions of code quality. For the interviews they brought along code from their own experience to discuss and exemplify code quality.Results. There was no common definition of code quality among or within these groups. Quality was mostly described in terms of indicators that could measure an aspect of code quality. Among these indicators, readability was named most frequently by all groups. The groups showed significant differences in the sources they use for learning about code quality with education ranked lowest in all groups.Conclusions. Code quality should be discussed more thoroughly in educational programs.
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| 5. |
- Börstler, Jürgen, et al.
(författare)
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"I know it when I see it" : perceptions of code quality
- 2017
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Ingår i: ITiCSE '17: Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education. - New York, NY, USA : Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). - 9781450347044 ; , s. 389-389
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Code quality is a key issue in software development. The ability to develop software of high quality is therefore a key learning goal of computing programs. However, there are no universally accepted measures to assess the quality of code and current standards are consideredweak. Furthermore, there are many facets to code quality. Defining and explaining the concept of code quality is therefore a challenge faced by many educators. In this working group, we investigate the perceptions of code quality of students, teachers, and professional programmers. In particular, we are interested in the differences in views of code quality by students, educators, and professional programmers and which quality aspects they consider as more or less important. Furthermore, we are interested in which sources of information on code quality and its assessment are used by these groups. Eventually, this will help us to develop resources that can be used to broaden students' views on software quality.
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| 6. |
- Börstler, Jürgen, et al.
(författare)
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"I know it when I see it" - Perceptions of Code Quality ITiCSE'17 Working Group Report
- 2018
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Ingår i: ITICSE-WGR'17. - New York, NY, USA : ACM Publications. ; , s. 70-85
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- Context. Code quality is a key issue in software development. The ability to develop high quality software is therefore a key learning goal of computing programs. However, there are no universally accepted measures to assess the quality of code and current standards are considered weak. Furthermore, there are many facets to code quality. Defining and explaining the concept of code quality is therefore a challenge faced by many educators. Objectives. In this working group, we investigated code quality as perceived by students, educators, and professional developers, in particular, the differences in their views of code quality and which quality aspects they consider as more or less important. Furthermore, we investigated their sources for information about code quality and its assessment. Methods. We interviewed 34 students, educators and professional developers regarding their perceptions of code quality. For the interviews they brought along code from their own experience to discuss and exemplify code quality. Results. There was no common definition of code quality among or within these groups. Quality was mostly described in terms of indicators that could measure an aspect of code quality. Among these indicators, readability was named most frequently by all groups. The groups showed significant differences in the sources they use for learning about code quality with education ranked lowest in all groups. Conclusions. Code quality should be discussed more thoroughly in educational programs.
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