Workshop Title: Research Ideas for the Next Five Years!
Objective: The objective of this workshop is to develop an organized set of research themes, ideas, projects, and other beginnings focusing on software engineering education and training that we believe are important, and should become projects for the near future.
Duration: Half-day
Relevance to the conference: As we look into the future of the community that is interested in software engineering education and training, what research projects do we believe need to be investigated? I think this is something that is central to our conference, and to our community.
Key organizer's name: Mike Barker
Affiliation: Nara Institute of Science and Technology
Brief bio: I began working in the software industry in 1977, and spent time in a small consulting company (200-400 people) near Washington, DC, in RCA near Philadelphia, and at BBN, both in Cambridge and Japan. I also worked at a Japanese software company for five years. Then I began working at MIT, where I led the Athena Project for 5 years, and organized and led the Educational Media Creation Center, which built a learning management system for MIT. Since August, 2003, I have been teaching at Nara Institute of Science and Technology. I am an ACM and IEEE Computer Society member, as well as a PMP-certified member of PMI. I was the CSEE&T Steering Committee Chair from 2012-2017. I have also been the ISERN Program Co-Chair from 2014-2015.
I do not currently have assistants for this workshop, although I think Dan Port or other members of the committee might be willing to help out.
Strategy for publication of the workshop? Aside from publication in the proceedings, I suspect we can put up our results in the LinkedIn group, and possible a Facebook group?
Number of participants? I'd like to think everyone at the conference would be interested in participating!
Requests for pre-workshop input? I was going to ask people to come and do brainstorming at the workshop, so hadn't really planned on preparation.
Workshop activities and format:
Basically, the workshop will consist of three parts, each about an hour in duration.
1. In teams, brainstorm research themes, projects, ideas that you believe to be important for the future of software engineering education and training. Make a list, and try to include as many ideas as possible. Now, group those, and produce a set of post-its with the most important items.
Next, let's put the post-its up on a common whiteboard, and spend some time grouping and consolidating them into a cohesive list. There may be outliers, and that's fine. At this point, we are looking for the most complete list we can make.
Capture that list, and the groups.
2. Again, in teams, rank the items in terms of importance. From 1 to 10, with 1 being the least important, and 10 being the most important, how do these items rank?
Each team can put their ranking up by the items on the whiteboard.
We will try to achieve a consensus on the rankings, capturing any significant discussion of why this item should be ranked higher or lower. The final ranking will be noted on the post-its!
3. Finally, in teams, rank the items on two scales, size (from 1 to 5, 1 being small-scale projects and 5 being large-scale projects) and expected time to complete (from 1 year to 5 years in the future. Some may have a larger time horizon!).
Each team, put your rankings by the items on the whiteboard. Then we are going to rearrange the post-its, with small-scale to large-scale running vertically, and expected time to complete running horizontally. These are relative, and we may adjust the rankings as we see where the various projects fall out.
We will use Google sheets to capture the various teams' individual rankings, and the consensus final rankings.
Formal workshop outputs:
1. The main workshop outputs will be
a. a list of research themes, ideas, or projects, and the groupings of those themes.
b. a rank ordering of the projects in terms of importance.
c. a rank ordering of the projects in terms of size and time to complete
We may, if individuals will agree to it, ask that they write up the themes, ideas, or projects in more detail following the workshop, and make those write-ups available to the workshop participants. For example, someone might want to suggest a research methodology or resources for a specific project.
Strategy for judging the workshop's success:
The main goal of this workshop is to develop an overview of the research themes that we, as a community, believe are important to the field of software engineering education and training. Probably the best way to judge the success of this workshop would be to track how many of these projects are taken up by members in the next five years. In the short term, I think the easiest way to judge the success of this workshop will be to ask the participants and the rest of the conference whether the list of themes and projects, and the rankings, is useful to them!
Reference: See the April 2012 Panel Session described here