arXiv subjects

Jocelyn Simmonds

Publications and source records attributed to Jocelyn Simmonds.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2024

Making Software Development More Diverse and Inclusive: Key Themes, Challenges, and Future Directions

Introduction: Digital products increasingly reshape industries, influencing human behavior and decision-making. However, the software development teams developing these systems often lack diversity, which may lead to designs that overlook the needs, equal treatment or safety of diverse user groups. These risks highlight the need for fostering diversity and inclusion in software development to create safer, more equitable technology. Method: This research is based on insights from an academic meeting in June 2023 involving 23 software engineering researchers and practitioners. We used the collaborative discussion method 1-2-4-ALL as a systematic research approach and identified six themes around the theme challenges and opportunities to improve Software Developer Diversity and Inclusion (SDDI). We identified benefits, harms, and future research directions for the four main themes. Then, we discuss the remaining two themes, Artificial Intelligence & SDDI and AI & Computer Science education, which have a cross-cutting effect on the other themes. Results: This research explores the key challenges and research opportunities for promoting SDDI, providing a roadmap to guide both researchers and practitioners. We underline that research around SDDI requires a constant focus on maximizing benefits while minimizing harms, especially to vulnerable groups. As a research community, we must strike this balance in a responsible way.

cs.SE↗

arXiv2018

Software Engineering for Millennials, by Millennials

Software engineers need to manage both technical and professional skills in order to be successful. Our university offers a 5.5 year program that mixes computer science, software and computer engineering, where the first two years are mostly math and physics courses. As such, our students' first real teamwork experience is during the introductory SE course, where they modify open source projects in groups of 6-8. However, students have problems working in such large teams, and feel that the course material and project are "disconnected". We decided to redesign this course in 2017, trying to achieve a balance between theory and practice, and technical and professional skills, with a maximum course workload of 150 hrs per semester. We share our experience in this paper, discussing the strategies we used to improve teamwork and help students learn new technologies in a more autonomous manner. We also discuss what we learned from the two times we taught the new course.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2010

Optimizing Computation of Recovery Plans for BPEL Applications

Web service applications are distributed processes that are composed of dynamically bounded services. In our previous work [15], we have described a framework for performing runtime monitoring of web service against behavioural correctness properties (described using property patterns and converted into finite state automata). These specify forbidden behavior (safety properties) and desired behavior (bounded liveness properties). Finite execution traces of web services described in BPEL are checked for conformance at runtime. When violations are discovered, our framework automatically proposes and ranks recovery plans which users can then select for execution. Such plans for safety violations essentially involve "going back" - compensating the executed actions until an alternative behaviour of the application is possible. For bounded liveness violations, recovery plans include both "going back" and "re-planning" - guiding the application towards a desired behaviour. Our experience, reported in [16], identified a drawback in this approach: we compute too many plans due to (a) overapproximating the number of program points where an alternative behaviour is possible and (b) generating recovery plans for bounded liveness properties which can potentially violate safety properties. In this paper, we describe improvements to our framework that remedy these problems and describe their effectiveness on a case study.

cs.SE↗