Teaching Software Engineering with Open Source Projects

Teaching Software Engineering with
Open Source Projects
Ioannis Stamelos
Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
Dept of Informatics
Software Engineering Group
http://sweng.csd.auth.gr
stamelos@csd.auth.gr

Macau, UNU-IIST, 9/5/2013 2
Presentation Outline
● Introduction
● General Idea
● The AUTH / OPENSE project
● The Social Infirmatory Project
● Conclusion and Future work

● Introduction
● General Idea

City of Thessaloniki
● Capital of Macedonia region, northern Greece
● ~1 M inhabitants, 2nd
greek city, major port of Balkan area
● 2300 years of continuous history, joined modern Greece in
1912

Aristotle University of
Thessaloniki
● First school (Philosophy) established in 1925
● Largest Greek University
● 45 departments
● > 60.000 students
● > 3.000 staff / teachers
www.auth.gr
•

Five Research Labs
● Programming Languages and Software Engineering
● Data Technologies and Engineering
● Information Processing and Artificial Intelligence
● Multimedia (Educational Technologies)
● Networks, Communications and Architecture

Programming Languages and Software
Engineering Lab
● 7 staff members
● several research associates
● 30 PhD students
● Major research areas:
– Intelligent Systems
– Knowledge Engineering
– Software Engineering
– Statistics in Information Systems
– Web Information Systems

Software Engineering Group (SWENG)
● 3 academic staff members:
– Associate Professor I. Stamelos (FLOSS,
Software Engineering)
– Associate Professor L. Angelis (Empirical
Software Engineering)
– Assistant Professos P. Katsaros (Formal
Methods, Software Quality)
● 2 research associates
● 14 PhD students
● http://sweng.csd.auth.gr

SWENG: Teaching
● Dept. of Informatics
– Introduction to Software Engineering
– Object Oriented Analysis / Java
– Software Security and Reliability
● Master Courses
– Software Project Management
– Enterprise Information Systems
– Advanced Information Systems Development
(International Hellenic Open University)

SWENG: R&D Activities
● Basic Research
● Funded Applied Research & Development from
– Greek Secretariat for Research and Technology
– EU (FLOSS topics)
– Greek Private Companies
– Greek Secretariat for Sports
● Collaboration with other research teams:
– Malardalen Univ (Vasteras, Sweden),
– UNU-MERIT (Maastricht), UNU-IIST (Macau)
– Pol. Lausanne (CH, prof. Sifakis, Turing Award)
– Stonybrook Univ. (USA)
– Tampere Univ (Tampere, Finland),
– Univ. Juan Carlos (Madrid),
– Athens Univ. of Business & Economy,
– Politecnico di Torino, Univ. LAMSADE (Paris)

SWENG: Major Research Areas
● Software Quality
● Software Cost Estimation
● Software Management and Evaluation
● Software Engineering Education
● Software Architecture
– All the above applied on FLOSS
● Extreme Programming
● Formal Methods
● ~300 publications on international refereed conferences and
journals

● Introduction
● General Idea
● The OPENSE project
● The Social Infirmary Project

One Major Software
Engineering Education
Problem
● One of the major problems in software engineering
education is the involvement of students in real world
software projects
● Typical projects given to SE students:
– “Toy” applications: not real projects
– Funded research projects: too few, not always real
projects
– Industry projects: too few, problems with student
familiarization, integration in enterprise environment

ACM Requirements for SE
Curricula
● Need to comply with specific ACM requirements
– Source: ACM Computing Curricula 2005: The Overview Report
● Identification and acquisition of skill sets that go beyond technical
skills
● Such skill sets include interpersonal communication skills, team
skills, and management skills
● Exposure to an appropriate range of applications and case studies
that connect theory and skills learned in academia to real-world
occurrences to explicate their relevance and utility.

ACM Requirements for SE
Curricula, cont.
● Attention to professional, legal, and ethical issues so that
students acquire, develop, and demonstrate attitudes and
priorities that honor, protect, and enhance the profession’s
ethical stature and standing.
● Demonstration that each student has integrated the various
elements of the undergraduate experience by undertaking,
completing, and presenting a capstone project

The Open Source Ecosystem
● ~500K open source projects, billions of lines of code,
several thriving communities
● Several forges (SourceForge, GitHub,...)
● Hundreds of successful results (Linux, Apache Web Server,
Firefox, LibreOffice...) in almost all application domains
● Typically, quality is equal or better than closed source
counterparts
● However, ~80% are dead projects, care is needed...

Open Source offers the
solution to the problem
● The abundance of Open Source projects provide a
solution, offering multilingual,multi-cultural
environments in every application domain, at
different levels of size, maturity, organization etc.
● FLOSSPOLS survey: 35-47% of respondents
claimed that “by being members of an Open
Source project, they acquired basic/introductory
programming, managing complex software
systems, testing etc skills in a period of two years”

Degree of educational
opportunities
● Software engineering knowledge areas according to
SWEBOK and degree of educational opportunities in
FLOSS on a 1 to 5 scale per Area of SE Education
(source: SWEBOK, Guide to the Software Engineering
Body of Knowledge. IEEE Computer Society Press,
2004)
● Software configuration management XXX
● Software engineering management XX
● Software engineering process XX
● Software engineering tools and methods XXX
● Software quality XXXX

Degree of educational opportunities,
cont.
● Software requirements XXX
● Software design XXX
● Software construction XXX
● Software testing XXXX
● Software maintenance XXX

Justificaton of Degrees
● Software Configuration
Management (XXX)
– Omnipresent in OSS (CVS, SVN,
GIT tools etc) – frequent releasing
– However, it concerns only code and
tests, little care for documentation
configuration management

Justificaton of Degrees, 2
● Software Engineering (Project)
Management (XX)
– PM in OSS is totally different in terms of
human resource management (no hiring, focus
on participant retainment), costing (no budget),
planning and scheduling (only occasional,
quite loose schedules), etc.

● Software Engineering Process
– OSS is a sui generis process, not a
waterfall, not a spiral model
– In addition, forking or community
shifts makes the OSS process hard to
predict

● Software Engineering Tools and Methods (XXX)
- Several coding and testing techniques are applied in OSS. However, not all
projects have strict guidelines on how to develop and test code.
● Software Quality has much to learn from OSS (XXXX)
– Quality is based on informal people activities, similar to agile methods
– Software quality achieved through proper project organization, high levels of
standards for comits, community quality

● Software requirements (XXX)
– rarely found in OSS
– This may be seen as an opportunity for students to
engage in OSS
● Software Design
– No prior design activities
– However, design issues are often discussed in OSS and
best designs are chosen for inclusion in the codebase

● Software construction (XXX)
–Intense coding
–Not always specific code standards are adopted
● Software testing (XXXX)
–Great results in many OSS projects
– Informal techniques adopted, “Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are
shallow”, E. Raymond
● Software maintenance (XXX)
–OSS projects evolve continuously, good opportunity for students to
see how software evolves in practice
–Evolution is sometimes chaotic

Generic Conclusion
● You can't teach everything in software
engineering by looking only at OSS projects
● But you can teach a lot
– so let's proceed by looking at how students may
be engaged in OSS projects to learn specific SE
areas and acquire specific skills

● Introduction
● General Idea

AUTH Pilot Courses
● 2008 EU/FLOSSCom project: investigated
learning in FLOSS communities and FLOSS
as a learning environment
● 2007 / 2008 AUTH pilot courses with
students volunteering to participate in OSS
projects as part of their course

The ISE/OOA Courses
● Introduction to Software Engineering
– 5th Semester, mandatory course
– Basic SE concepts, software paradigms, life cycle models
and development phases, testing
● Object Oriented Analysis
– 6th Semester, mandatory course for the Information Systems
stream
– Object orientation, UML, RUP/ICONIX, analysis & design,
components

Software Engineering: an ill-
structured domain
● Excluding formal methods, software
engineering is largely based on informal
techniques, experiences, empirical
evidence
● From an educational point of view, to a
large extent, it is an ill-structured
domain

Two ways to cope with ill-structured
domains
● Project-based learning
– Students become responsible for their
activity, use several information sources,
resolve a practical problem
● Collaborative learning
– Focuses on social learning aspects, learning
occurs through interactions

Approach
● Students have to undertake an assignment
(project-based learning), after receiving
introduction to theoretical concepts
– They need to participate in an OSS project of their
choice, taking one out of several possible roles,
potentially interacting with peer students
(collaborative learning)

Four student roles
● ISE
– Requirements Engineer
– Tester
– Coder
● OOA
– Analyst/Designer

Student Assignment Steps
● Attend theory lectures / exercises / labs
● Find a suitable project – iterate through many if necessary
● Interact with project community to define his/her deliverables
● Produce deliverables
● Report deliverables to the project
● Receive community comments, obtain acceptance
● Produce assignment report, make a public presentation, fill in a
questionnaire on their assignment

Student Grading
● Students are graded based on
– Their presentation
– Their learning project
– The quality of their deliverables
– Timeliness, Interaction with the
community (~40%)

Several Years of Systematic
Application
08/09 09/10 10/11 11/12 Total
Req.
Engineers
19 16 117 63 215
Testers 12 27 50 23 112
Developers 0 7 20 5 32
Designers/
Analysts
n.a. n.a. 26 23 49
Total 31 50 213 114 408

Students' Perspective
● Students:
– Have a very positive attitude towards the method (92%)
– Found project selection a hard task (35%, had to visit 6 projects
on average before deciding)
– 44% could fix the bugs they found
– 78% could understand the project code
– 67% will continue to participate in their project
– 54% would be interested in helping next student generation
– Little interaction with peers

The EU/OPENSE Project
● Start: October 2009
● Duration: 25 month
● Supported by: LifelongLearningProgramme, European
Commission
● Number of project partner: 10 entities from 8 EU countries
(Universities and Enterprises)
● Countries represented: Austria, Finland, France, Greece,
Portugal, Spain, The Netherlands, United Kingdom

Project lead partners
● Conceptual Framework, Methodology & Structure: Andreas
Meiszner, UNU-MERIT – The Netherlands / SPI - Portugal
● Pilot Lead: Ioannis Stamelos, Aristotle University of
Thessaloniki – Greece
● Content Framework Lead: Wouter Tebbens, Free Technology
Academy – The Netherlands
● Learner Support Framework Lead: Ross Gardler, University
of Oxford / OSSWatch, Research Technology Service (RTS),
Oxford University Computing Services – UK

Project lead partners, cont.
● Technical Framework Lead: Jesus M. Gonzalez-Barahona,
Universidade Rey Juan Carlos, Departamento de Sistemas
Telemáticos y Computación – Spain
● Evaluation Lead: Ruediger Glott, UNU-MERIT – The Netherlands
● Project Co-ordination: Jose Carvalho, Sociedade Portuguesa de
Inovação – Portugal

Special expertise partners
● Elmar Husmann, European Learning Industry Group
(ELIG) – Austria
● Imed Hammouda, Tampere University of Technology,
Department of Software Systems – Finland
● Patrick McAndrew, The Open University, Institute of
Educational Technology (IET) – UK
● Olivier Ricou, EPITA, Ecole pour l'Informatique et les
Techniques Avancées – France

OPENSE Activities
● AUTH courses
● TUT (FI) implemented a course based on a
“community game”
● Other academic partners provided open-source
related courses
● Produced the OPENSE framework
● Www.opense.net
●

Learning Project
● Students are asked to report their experience as a 'learning project',
providing:
– A description of their OSS project
– Main project developer/community members
– Student involvement (how project was chosen, how student
approached the community, level of cooperation with community,
difficulties encountered, ...)
– Comitted (and uncomitted) deliverables
– Useful resources used throughout the project
– Personal remarks / comments

Past Learning Projects provide help
for new students
● They may help new students
– Choose an OSS project
– Find whom to talk to
– Decide what to do in the project
– Manage the relationship with the community
– ...

Learning Projects: Issues
● Hundreds of learning projects
● Not all of them of good quality
● Tacit knowledge, not easy to manage

New Student Roles: Reverse
Engineer
● Goal: to reverse engineer the OSS
project
– Produce one or more detailed class
diagrams
– Produce sequence diagrams
– Produce project documentation

New Student Roles: Community
Analyst
● Goal: to provide an analysis of the OSS
community
– Social Network Analysis
– Analysis of knowledge sharing activities (e.g.
how fast community responds to inquiries)
– Analysis of community effectiveness (e.g.
average time to fix bugs)

New Student Roles:
Qualifier/Certifier
● Goal: to identify quality problems (if any) in OSS
code/design
– Produce code/design measurements
– Compare with quality thresholds (e.g. Number of
statements per class method)
– Further locate problematic areas (e.g. through “code
smell” detection)
– Produce a comprehensive quality report

New Student Roles:
Reuser/Component Maker
● Goal: to produce reusable components out of
the OSS project code (using OPENSME
technology, see opensme.eu)
– Analyse project code for candidate components
– Produce reusable components
– Componentize the code (replace old code with
the components produced)

● Introduction
● General Idea

A mixture of Open Source
education and participation
in social actions
● Greece is in a deep financial crisis that has
produced severe social problems
– Official unemployment is ~27%, extremely high for
young people and women
– 25% of Greek citizens have no health insurance

Social Infirmaries
● 15-20 Social Infirmaries have been established based on
volunteers
–Physicians
–Pharmacists
–Dispensary Managers
–Plain citizens
● Thessaloniki Social Infirmary is particularly active
● http://koinwniko-iatreio.gr/ (unfortunately in greek)

Powered by Greeklug/
OPENEMR
● IT support by the Greek Linux Users Group
● http://www.greeklug.gr/index.php?lang=en
● Greeklug volunteers have installed OPENEMR to
support S.I. Activities
● OPENEMR is an Open Electronic Medical
Records application, based on LAMP (Linux,
Apache Web Server, MySql, PhP)
● http://www.open-emr.org/

OPENEMR Pharmacy
Dispensary Module
● A pharmacy dispensary module is available
● http://www.open-
emr.org/wiki/index.php/Pharmacy_Dispensary_Module
● However, it is not well developed – OPENEMR has
focused on other aspects, such as patient records
● Social Infirmatories have both typical and non typical
requirements

Typical S.I. Requirements
● Basic Drug data base management
operations
– Official drugs list handling (some 6000
drugs may be officially used in
Greece)
– Handling active ingredients
– Out-of-stock control

Non Typical S.I. Requirements
● Display expired drug boxes (often
donated drugs are close to expire)
● Display near expiration drug boxes
● Handle multiple donations

Use Case Model for S.I. Pharmacy
Dispensary

Next Steps
● Ready to announce the project to the community
● Hoping to receive positive reaction
● Will proceed with project implementation until July
● Will provide the module to all Greek S.I.s
● Will produce the GUI in English, so that all S.I.s
around the world may use it

● Introduction
● General Idea

Conclusion
● Blending Open Source projects and formal higher
education has a lot of benefits
– Including real world experience and peer learning
● Several practical problems are present
– need to implement the approach with care and
monitor for recurring issues
● Several opportunities are available
– mixing open source + education + local
social/market needs may boost the approach

Future Work: Improve
Education Process
● Focus on peer learning and assessment
–Leverage peer learning and assessment
–Peer assessment by students
● Manage accumulated knowledge
–Provide tools for exploiting knowledge on how to
choose projects, handle community issues, produce
useful results: text mining, opinion mining, sentiment
mining
–Study student anti-patterns, package successful and
unsuccessful past cases (case-based learning)

Future Work: Extend
Application
● Get the approach adopted by more Universities
– Combine forces!
● Extend student roles
– Including open source certification / qualification, reverse
engineering, community analysis, component reuse
● Guide students to provide solutions to local social / market
needs
– Cope with the difficulty to find a suitable project
– Make their open source experience a career start!

Conference Publication List
A Framework for Teaching Software Testing using F/OSS Methodology, S. Sowe, I.
Stamelos, Proc. 2nd International Conference on Open Source Systems (OSS), Springer, pp. 261-
266, OSS 2006
An Empirical Approach To Evaluate Students Participation In Open Source Software
Projects, S. Sowe, L. Angelis, I. Stamelos, , Proc. IADIS Cognitive and Exploratory Learning
in the Digital Age (CELDA), pp. 304-308, CELDA 2006
A Hybrid Approach to Computer Science Education, A. Meiszner, K. Moustaka, I. Stamelos,
Proceedings of International Conference on Computer Supported Education, INSTICC Press,
pp. 39-46, CSEDU 2009
Students’ Perspectives On Learning Software Engineering With Open Source Projects -
Lessons Learnt, P. Papadopoulos, I. Stamelos, A. Meiszner, Proceedings of International
Conference on Computer Supported Education, CSEDU 2012
Using Open Source Projects in Higher Education: A Two-Way Certification Framework, P.
Papadopoulos, I. Stamelos, A, Cerone, Open Source Certification Workshop (OPENCERT) 2012

Journal Publication List
Teaching a Software Engineering Course in the Context of Free/Open Source Software
Projects: Experiences from a Pilot Study, S. Sowe, I. Stamelos, Journal of Information
Systems Education (JISE), EDSIG, 18 (4), pp.425-436, 2007
Teaching Software Engineering with FLOSS Projects, I. Stamelos, Journal of Open Source
Software and Processes, IGI Global, International Journal of Open Source Software &
Processes, Vol. 1, Issue 1, pp. 72-90, 2009
Enhancing software engineering education through open source projects: Four years of
students’ perspectives, Pantelis M. Papadopoulos, Ioannis G. Stamelos, Andreas Meiszner,
Education and Information Technologies, Springer, 18 (2) pp. 381-397, 2013

Book Chapters
● Learning Outcome Recognition in the Context of Open
Education: a Case-Study of Students Learning through Open
Source Project Participation, I. Stamelos, P. Papadopoulos, in A.
Meiszner, Ed. ELIG/ONU Open Education (forthcoming)
● Management and Coordination of Free/Open Source Projects, I.
Stamelos, in Future Project Management, C. Wohlin, G. Ruhe, Eds,
Springer (forthcoming)

Teaching Software Engineering with Open Source Projects

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