Agile 2007

This week, I've been away at the Agile 2007 Conference and it occurred to me that you might wonder why we go to conferences.

There are three communities that we try to keep in touch with: other educators, people in industry and people doing research in areas similar to ours. Connections with those people help us stay up-to-date and help us innovate in our curriculum, classrooms, and research.

Agile 2007 is a strongly industry-focused conference. Probably 95% of the attendees are associated with developing software from people in the trenches to upper management. It's a great time to see new tools and techniques that teams are using to create high quality software quickly. For me, it confirmed that the content in our Testing and XP course is up-to-date (though I think we'll add continuous integration this spring). It also confirms that my consulting activities are current, though I picked up a few tricks here and there.

Agile 2007 also had an educator's symposium for people to talk about how they are teaching agile methods. It included talks on project courses at other schools and I presented the innovations we have made to CS1 (I've presented our project course to a number of venues in the past). You can see the project I presented on here (Click on TDD in CS1). On this front, we are definitely on the leading edge. People were very surprised that freshmen can master TDD while learning everything else they need to learn in that course. I think a lot of people will be watching the labs develop and using them in their courses, too.

Any way, this conference confirmed that our technology is up-to-date. In October, I'll be heading to Frontiers in Education which is entirely focused on teaching. I'll let you know what I learn.

We're Getting Ready . . .

I know it seems like it's the middle of summer to you, but I'm busy getting ready for school to start! I can't wait until the students return - it's always more fun when they are here.

I've finished with freshmen orientation. Though they didn't heckle me like last year's group, I heard some good questions and everyone seemed enthused (many of you saw Professor Briggs as he covered for me while I was out of town - my thanks to him!). Your schedules are almost complete and you should be receiving them soon. Remember - read early!

I have a new innovation to try this year: a Google department calendar. It's title is "Shippensburg University Computer Science Department" and you should be able to search for it and view it from your google calendar (if you need a google account, let me know - I can hook you up!). So far, it doesn't have much, but when you all get back and we set times for programming team, ACM, the research discussion group, and everything else, it'll fill up fast. I'm hoping this will keep everyone aware of the variety of things that are going on. Let me know if you can't see it . . .

If you have any other ideas for things we should try in the fall, let me know!

We got a CRA-W Research Grant!

Our Software Engineering Huddle has some big news: two students and I just received a research grant from the Computing Research Association's Committee on the Status of Women in Computing Research! The program that is providing the funding is their Collaborative Research
Experience for Undergraduates in Computer Science and Engineering and we are very proud to have been selected.

The team consists of Sarah Joseph (a junior CS major), Logan Kennedy (a sophomore CS major) and me. The grant provides the students with a stipend for their work. We will be investigating how tools can help agile software development practices be adopted by large or distributed teams. We will develop a number of desktop widgets to disseminate information like build status and metrics like unit test passing rates. We will publish these widgets through the open source community to gather information on their usefulness. In addition, we will be investigating intra-team communication strategies used in agile teams in order to design tools to help large teams match the communication strategies of small teams.

We'll be publishing our progress on a web site, but that isn't up yet. When it is, I'll let you know so you can see the cool things we do.

Summer Travel

I just thought I'd catch you up on some of the things the faculty are doing this summer.

Dr. Mao is just returning from a tour of Asia. He presented research papers in Korea and China. Those papers were co-authored with Dr. Lee and Shannon Kelly who was one of our graduate students who graduated this May.

Professor Briggs continues to work on his dissertation and is making good progress. In addition, he has done some consulting with a company in Chambersburg helping them configure their e-commerce web server with the latest server software.

I attended a three day workshop on Program Assessment at the University of Delaware. It was run by Middle States (who accredits the University) and I learned that our assessment is pretty strong. I picked up a few pointers, but mostly I confirmed the direction we took as part of our ABET accreditation. Later this summer, I'll be attending Agile 2007 in Washington, D.C. to present a paper on the changes we've made to Computer Science I as we have introduced test-driven development into the curriculum. I, too, have spent some time consulting and, as a result, have gained some insights that will be valuable in my Metrics and Process Management course this fall. I'm really looking to that class!

I hope everyone's summer is going well. The logs I've read on your internships sound really interesting - keep up the good work!

Graduation

As I finish up my grading (no, I have not finished grading the 210 papers!), graduation is already complete. This year, 23 seniors and 10 Masters students graduated. As I look at the lists, there are people there of which I'm very proud. Students who have completed their degrees after interruptions for serving in Iraq, students who have overcome personal challenges, and, students that have posed interesting questions in my classes.

I love going to graduation because it's a good time to stop and think about what we've done (good and bad) and where we're headed. While these students have been here, we've changed our curriculum, gotten our accreditation and begun to create an undergraduate research program. As I look forward, we're working on ways to grow that undergraduate research program and to improve our M.S. degree.

Summer is generally quiet, but keep an eye - I'll try to post some news about our interns as I receive it. Besides, summer's too quiet if I don't hear from any of you!

Enjoy!

New and funny WiCS podcast episode

The WiCS team has been filming episodes of their podcast so that we could publish them all summer. However, yesterday they finished one that was so cool that they decided to put it out early. It's on the technology that the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency uses to coordinate responses to emergencies. I know, that doesn't sound wildly cool. The cool part is that it's a parody of Dragnet! It was fun to make and I think it's fun to watch. Check in out at the WiCS page. Please leave comments and check out the other episodes, too!

Flex-mania

Check out the snacks in my office! Tina and Sarah had too much flex at the end of the term, so they've stored snacks that'll keep them filled next fall! Thanks to Seth for the help in toting!