CSEE&T 2023 Workshop CFP:
Bad Smells in Software Engineering Education
Aug 7, 2023
Tokyo, Japan
Contribution submissions deadline: June, 7 2023
There are a number of common bad practices that software engineering students innocently fall into. Software engineering educators need to detect (“smell”) these bad practices early on and provide students with guidance on better practices before they become ingrained habits that are difficult to change. Some examples of bad practice smells include copying and pasting code without understanding it, employing few or poorly written comments, not following coding standards and formatting guidelines, over-complicating solutions, writing code with no clear purpose, jumping into coding before thinking about the design, writing large blocks of code without testing, and not seeking feedback or assistance when stuck.
Data from surveys and interviews with students indicate that bad practices are common and have real negative consequences. Bad practices can hinder the learning process. And current software engineering curricula and teaching methods may not adequately address them, or may not address them early enough, leaving students to develop bad habits that linger into their later careers.
Enabling instructors to “smell” bad practices and proactively address them can help them to help students understand why these practices do harm in the long run. Thus instructors can provide guidance and reinforcement for better practices within software engineering coursework which in turn can help to reduce or avoid the development of these bad habits.
This workshop aims to explore this issue by soliciting contributions to a shared repository of bad practice smells commonly observed in teaching introductory software engineering. The repository is intended to be workshopped at the conference. Participants should identify the commonly-occurring smells they have observed, along with supporting information discussing their contexts, the harm that they cause, and their remediations.
During the workshop, participants will present their contributions and facilitate workshopping them with the aim of clarifying the bad practices and how they can be detected, evidence on why they are bad, evidence on how common they are, and what guidance (ideally in the form of teaching materials) could be provided for better practices within the context of software engineering courses.
The workshop will produce a coherent and organized set of identified smells, along with recommendations for improving the education of software engineering novices, such as integrating early bad practice smell detection and remediation techniques into curricula, providing hands-on experience with better practices, data collection and analysis, and possible ways to measure improvement.
Expected outcome of the workshop:
Rather than publish the workshop results in the proceedings, we aim to have participants collaborate after the workshop on a paper publishing the results in a suitable journal or future CSEE&T. This is a unique opportunity to work with your fellow educators to improve and advance software engineering education and training.
Contributions:
We will not be soliciting workshop papers. Rather, we will solicit contributions that document bad practices observed in teaching introductory software engineering. A contribution of a bad practice will have the following format:
A. Description of the bad practice
B. Why it is bad
C. How it is detected (“smelled”)
D. Evidence that the bad practice occurs or, at the minimum, multiple examples of its occurrence
E. Guidance (if any) for better practices within the context of software engineering courses
F. In what courses have the bad practices been observed
G. How (if at all) has the bad practice been addressed within software engineering courses or programs
H. What needs to be workshopped to address this bad practice
Please review the compendium draft set of contributions at:
You are welcome to expand on these contributions or submit other contributions that provide additional perspectives.
Multiple contributions may be made. Contributions will be evaluated on (1) relevance to the workshop theme, and (2) potential of contributor to actively participate in the workshop.
Accepted contributors will be expected to attend CSEE&T (virtual attendance may be available) and present their contributions at the workshop and collaborate on a subsequent publication. Contributions will be added to the compendium
Submit contributions using the above format to bsisee2023@gmail.com
Important Dates:
WORKSHOP ORGANIZING COMMITTEE
Questions and comments are welcome!