Tony Clear

• Auckland University of Technology

As Artificial Intelligence (AI) continues transforming workplaces globally, particularly within the Information Technology (IT) industry , understanding its impact on IT professionals and computing curricula is crucial. countries, addressing concerns about AI's increasing influence in IT sector workplaces and its implications for tertiary education...

Software Developers and Collective Empathy---Can They Be Disposed to Care?

Context: Security as a key non-functional requirement of software development is often ignored and devalued in DevOps programs, with security seen as an inhibitor to high velocity required in DevOps implementation. Hence, the DevSecOps approach as a security-orientated expansion to DevOps, has aimed to integrate security into DevOps implementation...

The last decade, deemed the age of the platform [1], saw a major shift in how software organizations operate and leverage platforms as a flavor of open innovation to extend their markets or “grow the pie” [2]. These platforms are used to underpin and form Software Ecosystems (SECOs) through which the platform provider, also known as the keystone or...

Global Software Engineering (GSE) research contains few examples consciously applying what Glass and colleagues have termed an 'evaluative-critical' approach. In this study we apply dilemma analysis to conduct a critical review of a major (and ongoing) nearshore Business Process Outsourcing project in New Zealand. The project has become so troubled...

Outsourcing is typically considered to occur in three phases: decision, transition and operation. As outsourcing is now well established the switching of vendors and transitioning from one system to another is common. However, most of the research to date on outsourcing has focused on the decision and operation phases, leaving a gap between theory...

The DevOps phenomenon is gaining popularity through its ability to support continuous value delivery and ready accommodation of change. However, given the relative immaturity and general confusion about DevOps, a common view of expectations from a DevOps role is lacking. Through investigation of online job advertisements, combined with interviews,...

Software has always been considered as malleable. Changes to software requirements are inevitable during the development process. Despite many software engineering advances over several decades, requirements changes are a source of project risk, particularly when businesses and technologies are evolving rapidly. Although effectively managing requir...

This study is directed towards highlighting tensions of incoming and outgoing vendors during outsourcing in a near-shore context. Incoming-and-outgoing of vendors generate a complex form of relationship in which the participating organizations cooperate and compete simultaneously. It is of great importance to develop knowledge about this kind of re...

This chapter assesses whether the short-term benefits of using digital technology to suppress the Covid-19 pandemic justify the detrimental long-term consequences for privacy. It addresses this complex question through an inevitably incomplete discussion of privacy data protection laws, technology design, and trust in governments and technology pro...

Context: Post-release user feedback plays an integral role in improving software quality and informing new features. Given its growing importance, feedback concerning security enhancements is particularly noteworthy. In considering the rapid uptake of Android we have examined the scale and severity of Android security threats as reported by its sta...

Context: The globalisation of activities associated with software development and use has introduced many challenges in practice and for research. While the predominant approach to research in software engineering has followed a positivist science model, this approach may be sub-optimal when addressing problems with a dominant social or cultural di...

Global software development practices are shaped by the challenges of time and 'distance', notions perceived to separate sites in a multi-site collaboration. Yet while sites may be fixed, the actors in global projects are mobile, so distance becomes a dynamic spatial dimension rather than a static concept. This empirical study applies grounded theo...

Driven by the need to coordinate activities of multiple agile development teams cooperating to produce a large software product, software-intensive organizations are turning to scaling agile software development frameworks. Despite the growing adoption of various scaling agile frameworks, there is little empirical evidence of how effective their pr...

This paper reports our extended analysis of the recent literature addressing global software engineering (GSE), using a new Systematic Snapshot Mapping (SSM) technique. The primary purpose of this work is to understand what issues are being addressed and how research is being carried out in GSE -- and comparatively, what work is not being conducted...

This study presents an analysis of the most recent literature addressing global software engineering (GSE). We examine the current state of GSE research using a new Systematic Snapshot Mapping (SSM) technique. We analysed 275 papers published between January 2011 and June 2012 in peer-reviewed conferences, journals and workshops. Our results provid...

Lockdown Lawyers: A Collection of COVID-19 Poetry, edited by Emma Trevett and Jon Whitfield, QC. London, UK: Legal Action Group. 2020, 96 pages. 978-1-913648-00-8 I ACCEPTED the invitation from my son-in-law (a barrister in London) to contribute to this anthology, with an antipodean poem I had written reflecting on COVID-19 and ANZAC day 'They sha...

Presentation given at FIE 2020. Outlines the case for Disposition as a component of competency and why it is essential to more effective engineering and computing education.

Driven by the need to coordinate activities of multiple agile development teams cooperating to produce a large software product, software-intensive organizations are turning to scaling agile software development frameworks. Despite the growing adoption of various scalin g agile frameworks, there is little empirical evidence of how effective their p...

The update of the broadly influential document Computing Curric-ula 2005 (CC2005), is underway with a project called Computing Curricula 2020 (CC2020). The CC2020 project plans to provide a vision for the future of computing, to produce a comprehensive report that contrasts curricular guidelines, and to contextualize those guidelines within a lands...

The broadly influential document Computing Curricula 2005 (CC2005) is in the process of being updated through a project called Computing Curricula 2020 (CC2020). CC2020 provides a vision for the future of computing education, including a comprehensive report that contrasts curricular guidelines, and contextualizing those guidelines within the broad...

We are pleased to introduce this Special Issue on Global Software Engineering Education published by the ACM Transactions on Computing Education (TOCE) that focuses on educational practices to prepare students for a global workplace. This issue comes at a time when universities are recognizing the need to provide courses that address the challenges...

Computing is still a young discipline with new topics emerging daily, spawning an extended family of disciplines, which makes negotiating a curriculum an inherently fraught process that will not meet everybody's needs.

Agile software development has become increasingly common in software vendor organisations, and their impact on practices and roles is now extending beyond the project level across the entire organisation. In this study, we investigate how a major Australia-based multi-site global software vendor transitioned from a structured to a Scaled Agile app...

Even though a computer science or computing-oriented degree is unavoidably broken into semesters and courses, we always hope that our students form a holistic picture of the discipline by the time they graduate. Yet we do not have too many opportunities to make this point in a convincing manner. The goal of this working group will be to address a w...

Global software engineering (GSE) is becoming common. It's thus important to educate university software engineering students in GSE. The authors discuss challenges to and recommendations for implementing such instruction.

Pioneering educators discuss how they inject realism into global-software-engineering education.

Even though a computer science degree is unavoidably broken into semesters and courses, we always hope that our students form a holistic picture of the discipline by the time they graduate. Yet as educators, we do not have too many opportunities to make this point front and center for an extended period of time. This report es a well-defined portio...

Quality assurance is a subject that has grown dramatically in importance in recent times. In previous work, we have described how the ACM Curricula can be used to support the Quality Assurance process of educational programs, using the Computer Science program at Reykjavik University as an example. Faculty members and employers of graduates partici...

How can students be included as critical stakeholders in the systems and services provided by a university? To address the whole student experience, we engaged students and employees at a large Swedish university in a vision seminar process to elicit how these groups envisioned an ideal future university, and the necessary changes to technology and...

An ITiCSE 2015 conference working group report has recently delivered a comprehensive systematic review of the literature addressing the challenges and solutions in teaching global software engineering courses. In this panel session, a group of authors of that report will review the findings, and present their own views on teaching such courses, th...

Active learning is a popular concept for motivating learning. Learning agreements are one strategy towards this goal. They can be used to aid the students to take ownership of their learning and in becoming more active in a course. Learning Agreements are especially useful tools for scaffolding learning in courses with a focus on developing the pro...

As joint invited editors, we are proud to present the April 2016 and August 2016 issues of CLEIej, which include a number of revised and reviewed versions of the best papers presented at CLEI 2015 in Arequipa, Peru in October 2015. Authors were asked to prepare extended papers with new contributions with respect to the conference versions; a total...

We examine the concept of motivation from the perspective of Self Determination Theory and give a brief overview of relevant results. We also consider the optimal state known as "Flow" and give an account of its conceptualisation in the theory due to Csikszentmihalyi. After discussion of ways in which these concepts can be measured, we describe a s...

This paper presents the Certificate of Science and Technology (CertScT) a pre-degree programme at Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand, developed with the aim of preparing students to undertake degree level study in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) subjects. The history, context and rationale for the programme is...

This presentation reflects on method and practice in Computer Science Education Research, through introducing the process of conducting a Systematic Literature Review. While Systematic Literature Reviews are an established research method within the Software Engineering discipline, they are a relatively unfamiliar research approach within Computer...

A critical incident of avatar harassment which occurred in our early gamified virtual learning environment is re-examined in this chapter. Lessons learned subsequently lead us explore understanding and shaping people’s behaviours in gamified virtual environments (VEs). In this study, we develop a theoretical model for elaborating people’s behaviour...

The rapid development in the IT area brings a series of shifts, in underlying theories, technology and work practices. In the normal course of events, most changes are evolutionary, with small, incremental improvements being made to theoretical understanding or practical application. Occasionally, however, changes occur of such magnitude that they...

Context: Global Software Engineering (GSE) has become the predominant form of software development for global companies and has given rise to a demand for students trained in GSE. In response, universities are developing courses and curricula around GSE and researchers have begun to disseminate studies of these new approaches. Problem: GSE differs...

Context: Post-release user feedback plays an integral role in improving software quality and informing new features. Given its growing importance, feedback concerning security enhancements is particularly noteworthy. In considering the rapid uptake of Android we have examined the scale and severity of Android security threats as reported by its sta...

Educational institutions face many challenges in closing the gap between what is currently offered through academic engineering curricula and what is expected by society in general and industry in particular. There are many aspects to these challenges and here we address needs that are specific to global professionals by investigating the knowledge...

Peer-review is a valuable tool that helps both the reviewee, who receives feedback about his work, and the reviewer, who sees different potential solutions and improves her ability to critique work. In-flow peer-review (IFPR) is peer-review done while an assignment is in progress. Peer-review done during this time is likely to result in greater mot...

Global Software Engineering (GSE) research contains few examples consciously applying what Glass and colleagues have termed an 'evaluative-critical' approach. In this study we apply dilemma analysis to conduct a critical review of a major (and ongoing) near shore Business Process Outsourcing project in New Zealand. The project has become so trouble...

This study presents an analysis of the most recent literature addressing global software engineering (GSE). The primary purpose is to understand what issues are being addressed and how research is being carried out in GSE – and comparatively, what work is not being conducted. We examine the current state of GSE research using a new Systematic Snaps...

This paper reports our extended analysis of the recent literature addressing global software engineering (GSE), using a new Systematic Snapshot Mapping (SSM) technique. The primary purpose of this work is to understand what issues are being addressed and how research is being carried out in GSE – and comparatively, what work is not being conducted....

In this paper, we report on an ITiCSE-13 Working Group that developed a set of 654 multiple-choice questions on CS1 and CS2 topics, the Canterbury QuestionBank. We describe the questions, the metadata we investigated, and some preliminary investigations of possible research uses of the QuestionBank. The QuestionBank is publicly available as a repos...

Just about a year ago, John Impagliazzo asked if I'd be willing to form a task group to put together a report on the future of this magazine. I suspect he asked me for a couple of reasons. First, because I've been involved with Inroads for several years ...

China has long been an education import nation, so non-commercial and mutually beneficial collaborations between Chinese and Western universities are rare. Nevertheless, the School of Software Engineering at Tongji University in China has developed mutually beneficial collaboration with several Western universities, among them the most important pa...

This paper addresses two interrelated problems currently confronting computer science education, motivating students while simultaneously providing them with the skills they'll need to solve complex interconnected problems. We describe a framework for motivating computer science students by adding the context of social good to introductory computin...

Student performance on examinations is influenced by the level of difficulty of the questions. It seems reasonable to propose therefore that assessment of the difficulty of exam questions could be used to gauge the level of skills and knowledge expected at the end of a course. This paper reports the results of a study investigating the difficulty o...

EduBits, your quarterly roundup of ACM educational activities, focuses on education policy and the way it affects the K--12 educational space. Cameron Wilson, Director of Public Policy for ACM, gives us a glimpse into the challenges of improving CS education ...

Possibilities for collaboration in globally distributed projects have radically changed with the introduction of new Collaborative Technologies (CTs) in the Web 2.0 era. The use of such technologies in the context of students collaborating in a globally distributed project is little explored in research. A better understanding would provide opportu...

Collaborative Technology (CT) plays an important role in overcoming the challenges of globally distributed projects. It enables collaboration, but the specific choice of technology also imposes constraints on how projects are conducted. Over the past decade, we have engaged in an action research programme to develop an Open-Ended Group Project situ...

This paper addresses two interrelated problems currently confronting computer science education, motivating students while simultaneously providing them with the skills they'll need to solve complex interconnected problems. We describe a framework for motivating computer science students by adding the context of social good to introductory computin...

Global software development practices are shaped by the challenges of time and 'distance', notions perceived to separate sites in a multi-site collaboration. Yet while sites may be fixed, the actors in global projects are mobile, so distance becomes a dynamic spatial dimension rather than a static concept. This empirical study applies grounded theo...

This paper addresses two interrelated problems currently confronting computer science education, motivating students while simultaneously providing them with the skills they'll need to solve complex interconnected problems. We describe a framework for motivating computer science students by adding the context of social good to introductory computin...

Welcome to the third installment of EduBits, your quarterly pipeline to new and exciting happenings in the world of ACM education. Starting with this March issue of ACM Inroads, we are introducing a new thread that will highlight principal educational ...

This paper argues for paradigm pluralism in computing education research. The value of mixing paradigms, and the choice of methodological eclecticism and mixed methods is explored using pragmatic knowledge claims. A research study, which focused on the design of an introductory object-oriented programming (OOP) course for undergraduate students, is...

The Virtual Worlds Working Group began with the DEHub research consortium in November 2009. In December 2010, New Zealand joined the VWWG. This paper highlights the current work of the NZ based members of the group and presents the work of 23 authors at 11 institutes of higher education in New Zealand. The scope of the work covered is diverse, and...

The internationalization of tertiary education is giving rise to a number of 'export education' models, but cross-cultural collaborative educational programmes pose several challenges. Most undergraduate computing degrees include a capstone project as a means of consolidating student learning within an integrative final learning experience, which a...