Jussi Kasurinen

• D.Sc. (Software Engineering)
• Project Manager at South-Eastern Finland University of Applied Sciences

In the software industry, artificial intelligence (AI) has been utilized more and more in software development activities. In some activities, such as coding, AI has already been an everyday tool, but in software testing activities AI it has not yet made a significant breakthrough. In this paper, the objective was to identify what kind of empirical...

There have been discussions about the gender gap in STEM majors. While some fields (e.g., Biomedical Sciences) have a high proportion of women workers, the Computer Science (CS) and Software Engineering (SE) disciplines are lacking female specialists. Universities worldwide are implementing different practices to attract more women to the CS and SE...

When a software system gets old, it is time to decide whether it is replaced, revised, or removed from the support life cycle. In modern software development, migrating old monolithic systems into a solution by applying microservices is an option when the system is still needed, or the decision is made to modernize the existing component with new t...

Software engineering (SE) and computer science (CS) programs in universities worldwide are marked by a gender gap, which subsequently translates into a gender gap at the industry level. However, there are positive activities that can help attract more women to these male-dominant professions. This study maps the literature related to the achievemen...

Small software companies (SSCs) interact with the immediate environment, exposing them to challenges that force the organization to undertake adjustments if it must survive and remain in business. These adjustments result into counterproductive practices and changes that create complexities in process adoption. This cross-sectional survey investiga...

The quality of software products is among the most prevalent challenges threatening the software development primarily in small software companies (SSCs). These challenges are associated with insufficient practices affecting the production of software and the development processes. This paper explores the role of governance in streamlining software...

Context The gender imbalance in technology, sciences, and engineering is a global problem and according to the statistics, this really has not changed much in the last thirty years. Moreover, there is also a lack of women in tech entrepreneurship; most success stories are about male entrepreneurs, and in Silicon Valley the term describing the start...

Despite the inefficiency of software processes and products, small software companies (SSCs) enjoy a promising future. These companies are known to have few employees, creating the inefficiency that makes it challenging for the SSCs to adopt effective software practices. This subsequently introduces additional complexity, affecting software enginee...

For decades there have been arguments how to teach programming in the basic courses. Supportive intervention methods to improve students' learning and methods to improve assessment process have been widely studied. There are various successful methods to each topic separately, but only a few of them fit for both. In this work, we aimed at validatin...

The systematic mapping study (SMS) is a relatively new method of generating new information from existing studies. First defined as a methodology in 2007, it offers a method to filter existing information to produce novel insight into the observed research domain, and pinpoint new directions of research. In this study, the systematic mapping study...

The gender imbalance on the science, technology, engineering and medical domains commonly referred as STEM fields is a problem in the high-tech society. Furthermore, as women has been underrepresented in the field for decades, most success stories are usually male-driven. To study the factors affecting the women interest to-wards entrepreneurship a...

Low-quality software products are synonymous with small software companies, yet thousands of process tools and methods are available, although unfortunately, they remain unutilized. The utilization of these process tools are said to be very challenging to small software companies with the difficulty of adaptability tagged to the context in which th...

Free-to-play games are dominating the gaming environment on mobile phones. They are free to download and fast to get known and can hook gamers for a long period of time. Yet game companies are generating revenue with in-game payments. Research has shown that a small percentage of gamers actually use money in free-to-play games. This survey study is...

Small software companies face numerous challenges of complexity, unstructured software development processes and scarce resources. This notwithstanding, the companies have dominated the software market by 80 percent. The practice and products of these companies are still persistently marred by quality issues arising from the processes, with evidenc...

In this multi-case study we report the findings from three software projects conducted with SCRUM agile development framework. Each project took approximately a little less than a year to design, develop and test before the launch to the user groups. All project vendors utilized SCRUM framework customized to suit their processes, and included custo...

Personalization is an upcoming trend in gamification research, with several researchers proposing that gamified systems should take personal characteristics into account. However, creating good gamified designs is effort intensive as it is and tailoring system interactions to each user will only add to this workload. We propose machine learning alg...

The open data ventures can be summarized in a way that companies are reluctant to share their data with anyone, whereas governments open their data for citizens, institutions, and businesses as much as they can. However, this principle is changing, since there is added value in the digital information and datasets the companies possess and they are...

This paper presents an approach to map the V-Model development phases and testing levels with corresponding, actual testing techniques. We evaluated the approach with a 7 week undergraduate course on the basics of software testing. Our observations indicate that special care should be taken in stressing the objectives and outcomes of testing work,...

Testing and quality assurance are characterized as the most expensive tasks in the software life cycle. However, several studies also indicate that the industry could enhance product quality and reduce costs by investing in developing testing practices. Software engineering educators can bridge the gap between formal education and industry practice...

h i g h l i g h t s • This study presents four big trends and the core literature in gamification. • This publication provides a meta-review of several other literature reviews. • This publication identifies the most common publication venues on gamification. • The study concludes that the most pressing research issue currently is to collect eviden...

The interest towards the concept of open data has increased during the last ten years, as governments and municipalities have decided to open their data repositories. This has led to a new generation of mobile apps, which utilize this data to improve the feature richness and the overall user experience for the customers. In this study, we interview...

We followed the submissions of automatically evaluated weekly programming assignments on an introductory programming course and searched for identical solutions submitted by students. Our dataset covers three iterations of the course, from 2014 to 2016. From this systematic longitudinal sampling, we were able to scan for plagiarism patterns and bui...

In this paper we present an approach for personalizing gamification to the needs of each individual person. We designed the personalization for computer-supported collaborative learning environments by synthesizing three existing design frameworks: the lens of intrinsic skill atoms, gamification user type hexad and heuristics for effective design o...

It can be argued, that software development and game development share a number of features in their process models, such as the need to design, develop and test software functionalities. However, while the software engineering (SE) models work successfully supporting the software development, their practical application for game development is fre...

Fundamentally, computer science and its courses are considered difficult to learn, since so many concepts has to be grasped before anything worthwhile can be achieved. To make the things even more difficult, there also is a drive to cut costs on the teaching work, to minimize the amount of teaching staff and in general, steer the course modules tow...

Millennials have learned to seek information from the Internet whenever they need to know something and want to learn things. In this study, we present observations from several university courses with freely available online resources for the modern students. Ten different courses with video lectures were observed, often with positive outcomes and...

Software development in a small development team is a challenge, as people have to fulfill several roles, which in larger groups would have dedicated people. To help in this aspect, the ISO/IEC 29110 Lifecycle profiles for Very Small Entities has been developed to help organization and manage the workflow. However, the model presented in the ISO/IE...

The virtualization and the digital environments are common learning platforms in several different domains, such as in flying airplanes or controlling nuclear power plants. However, virtual reality is no longer expensive special hardware; the basic installations for virtual and augmented reality can be done within household budgets and with common...

Information and communications technology systems are increasingly important to the modern society. Understanding the complex systems, which powers our everyday lives, is an important competence for future experts, since everything is getting connected from the simple household devices to the complex industrial systems. In this paper, a high-level...

Open data has been a hot topic of the decade, as even the president of the United States has given input to the deployment of open data practices. Besides politics, open data has been discussed in the scientific literature. So far the big breakthrough has not happened, although several cases have proved that the open data concept works, and provide...

The game development in principle is not different from the traditional software development. In this study, the aim is to assess the video game development from the viewpoint of software engineering, assessing which software development activities are similar, and which incompatible within the game industry context. We interviewed 11 companies and...

Long lasting customer relationships have proven to be beneficial to the success of a company. The computer game business has traditionally been about developing and then selling products to the customers, but today the games apply different marketing strategies such as free-to-play model, which changes the role of a customer. The Existence, Related...

The objective of this industry study is to shed light on the current situation and improvement needs in software test automation. To this end, 55 industry specialists from 31 organizational units were interviewed. In parallel with the survey, a qualitative study was conducted in 12 selected software development organizations. The results indicated...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to identify the peculiarity of computer game organizations and their human resources. It presents a stage model including four phases covering the growth from demo group to full business. This study extends the research on how computer game organizations are formed and what it takes them to grow to financially...

Context: Software projects often have four objectives; to produce the required functionality, in budget and in schedule, with acceptable quality. That statement may be true for most of the ordinary software development projects, but are these objectives enough for game development, where creativity and artistic aspects have a major role? Goal: We a...

In this multiple case study we interviewed six Finnish computer game start-ups to find out what elements are included in their business models. We identified the key elements and used the analytical hierarchy process to rank the elements. We found out that computer game start-ups see their business model as a synonym to a revenue model and/or a bus...

[Context/motivation] Game development is characterized by a high level of creativity when compared to other fields of software development. Games cover a multitude of themes and genres, and represent a heterogeneous group of different products with varying requirements and business goals. [Question/problem] Requirements engineering (RE) should be r...

Computer science (CS) is a field of practical and scientific approach on computation and applications. Consequently, the CS students should be able to adjust to develop different types of software applications. However, even though video games are one type of software, they also impose additional requirements for the developers. In this paper we pr...

Software development in a small development team is a challenge, as people have to fulfill several roles, which in larger groups would have separate, dedicated people for the work. To help small development teams to organize their activities, ISO/IEC standardization body has developed the standard ISO/IEC 29110, Lifecycle profiles for Very Small En...

Context: Development of software is a complex process with several stakeholders and their varying practices. The game industry has also additional requirements such as artistic presentation, an interesting story and high quality sound effects that further complicate the process. Objective: The objective of this paper is to understand what kind of r...

In this study, the components important for testing work and organizational test process are identified and analyzed. This work focuses on the testing activities in real-life software organizations, identifying the important test process components, observing testing work in practice, and analyzing how the organizational test process could be devel...

Software projects have four main objectives; produce required functionalities, with acceptable quality, in budget and in schedule. These objectives are all important for software projects to be successful, but how does the end-product quality fit to them? The objective of this study is to explore how organizations understand software quality and id...

It has been estimated that more than two million students started computing studies in 1999 and 650,000 of them either dropped or failed their first programming course. For the individual student, dropping such a course can distract from the completion of later courses in a computing curriculum and may even result in changing their course of study...

One of the latest additions in defining the test process is the upcoming ISO/IEC 29119 standard, which aims to define a universally applicable generic test process model. However, currently the standard does not offer any support for the adoption process of the model. In this paper, we present our framework, which aims to combine a maturity level-b...

The study explores the current state of test automation in software testing organizations by focusing on the views and observations of managers, testers and developers in each organization. The case study was conducted in selected organizational units that develop and test technical software for industrial automation or telecommunication domains. T...

Software projects have four main objectives; produce required functionalities, with acceptable quality, in budget and in schedule. Usually these objectives are implemented by setting requirements for the software projects, and working towards achieving these requirements as well as possible. So how is the intended quality handled in this process of...

The objective of this industry study was to shed light on the current situation and improvement needs in software test automation. To this end, 55 industry specialists from 31 organizational units were interviewed. In parallel with the survey, a qualitative study was conducted in 12 selected software development organizations. The results indicated...

Software testing process is an activity, in which the software is verified to comply with the requirements and validated to operate as intended. As software development adopts new development methods, this means also that the test processes need to be changed. In this qualitative study, we observe ten software organizations to understand how organi...

The objective of this qualitative study was to observe and empirically study how software organizations decide on which test cases to select for their software projects. As the software test processes are limited in resources such as time or money, a selection process usually exists for tested features. In this study we conducted a survey on 31 sof...

In this paper, we studied the differences in testing activities between software organizations which apply agile development methods and organizations which take the traditional plan-driven approach. Our focus was on the concepts which allow the software organization to successfully apply agile development methods or plan-driven methods. We also ob...

The fundamentals of programming are a field that extensively uses different kinds of tools to enhance learning experience. These tools come in several sizes, offering wide range of different services or approaches to the teaching of introductory programming curricula. Even the basic taxonomy for CSE tools classifies over fifty different tools and s...

This paper introduces the research topic of “Elaborating Software Test Processes and Strategies”, in which I with assistance from our research group conducted a qualitative study on software producing organization's test processes. My goal is to develop a reference model for organizations to enhance and develop their test processes based on the upc...

The objective of this industry study is to shed light on the current situation and improvement needs in software test automation. To this end, 55 industry specialists from 31 organizational units were interviewed. In parallel with the survey, a qualitative study was conducted in 12 selected software development organizations. The results indicated...

The objective of this qualitative study was to explore and understand the problems of software testing in practice and find improvement proposals for these issues. The study focused on organizational units that develop and test technical software for automation or telecommunication domains, for which a survey of testing practices was conducted and...

In this paper we present a concept for three-phase measuring method, which can be used to obtain data on student learning. The focus of this method lies on the technical aspects of learning programming, answering questions like which programming constructs students applied and how large portion of the students understood the concepts of programming...

Decreasing interest in computer science and programming has caused trouble to many institutions recently. To tackle this issue an active improvement of the first programming course was started four years ago. In this paper the adopted action research approach is described together with the improved results from the course. The improvement actions h...

The teaching of fundamental programming skills is a field that extensively uses different kinds of tools to enhance learning experience. These tools come in several sizes, offering wide range of different equipment or approaches to the teaching of introductory programming curricula. At the same time, computer sciences, and programming courses in pa...

Programming skill is one of the skills everyone tends to expect from a computer science graduate. However, recently many universities have reported high dropout rates and problems grasping the basic programming concepts in the first programming courses. In some cases such problems can severely disturb the normal advancement of the studies since bas...

Teaching programming is difficult. Especially the ability to produce source code seems to be a difficult thing to teach. There are many problems related to student motivation, technical problems, teaching materials, and so far only few best practices have been identified. However, there are some practices and guidelines that have a tendency to give...