Latest News:
1. We just release a Agile task allocation game for Beihang Students at http://www.agelesslily.org/demo_agilemanager/, please download and play this game – the Agile Manager 2014.
This game allows the player to act as a manager of a virtual team of programmers. It creates a safe environment for the player to explore various strategies for allocating tasks to the virtual team. Each team member has different competence and task processing capacity; while each task has different difficulty, value, required effort, and deadline. As in real-world situations, the player cannot know the true competence of a virtual programmer. Instead, he/she needs to learn how competent each virtual programmer is based on past performance (which is presented in the game as a “5-star” rating scale). In this game, the player will experience the challenges of making task allocation decisions based on partial information to virtual programmers with limited capabilities.
All programming is simple: just conditional processing (if) and repetition (foreach), taking something in, doing something with it and then outputting something else (input, storage and output). The hard part is getting people to tell you what they want, how they want it, and managing their expectations of when they want it. Software engineering is a tricky thing, and involves human factors, and you must “condense fact from the vapour of nuance”
—- Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash
Introduction
Software development is a dynamic, continuous, complex and chaotic process, which is executed by human, and its result will work for human. Human is absolute key of the process. Emerging Agile Software Development (ASD) methodologies, such as Scrum, XP etc., which already focus on some human factors, such as trust, talent, skill, and communication, are more people-oriented than other plan-driven methodologies.However, based on our 10 year Software Engineering education experiments at Beihang University, China, we think that Agile methodologies can be improved by considering more human original characteristics.
College of Software (COS), Beihang University currently have about 600 undergraduate students and 4000 graduate students studying at 16 different Software Engineering branchs, including emerging Mobile Cloud Computing, Rich Internet Applications, Internet of Things, Big Data, IC Design, IT Project Management, SAP/ERP, Internet Marketing etc [1]. Our Human-centered Agile Software Engineering (HASE) study started from 2010, there are about 120 undergraduate and 100 graduate students will involve into this research every year. They are divided into 30-40 Agile teams with an average team size of 5-7 persons to fully experience aScrum, Extreme Programming (XP) or Agile Unified Process (AUP) process to develop software. A web-based Agile collaboration development platform – HASE [3] has been developed to support their development process. Since 2013, we have attended Windows Azure academic workshop hosted by MSRA twice in Beijing hand Shanghai respectively. We will introduce this fantastic platform and education kits into our new SE courses for graduate and undergraduate students from 2014 new semester.
Based on our prior works on Windows Mobile development [4], Software Engineering education [5, 6], Automated Software Engineering [7] and Mobile Cloud Architecture research [10] etc., the proposed newHASE-MC project try to utilize mobile cloud computing related technologies, including Windows Phone and Windows Azure platform, to upgrade our HASE platform to HASE-MC platform. With the combination of cloud computing and mobile networks, HASE-MC will be able to bring benefits for management of distributed agile team (especially international team), as well as process data collection of SE research community.
Platform: http://www.linjun.net.cn/hase/
References
[1] College of Software, Beihang University website (Chinese): http://www.beihangsoft.cn/
[2] Beihang University website (English): http://ev.buaa.edu.cn
[3] HASE Agile Collaboration Development Platform, see http://www.linjun.net.cn/hase/
[4] Jun Lin. “Research of Mobile Network Game Based on Windows Mobile Technologies”, Funded Project of Microsoft Research Asia Gaming & Graphics Theme 2005
[5] Jun Lin. “China MOE-Microsoft Elite Courseware Sharing Platform”, Supported Project of Microsoft Research Asia University Relation and China MOE
[6] Jun Lin, Wei Sun, “Engaging Students in Active Learning by Introducing Game Development into Software Engineering,” International Journal of Information Technology (IJIT), Volume 17, Number 02, 2011. Available at:http://intjit.org/journal/volume/17/2/172_1.pdf
[7] Jun Lin. “Context-Aware Task Allocation for Distributed Agile Team,” in Proceeding of 28th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2013), Palo Alto, November 11 – 15, 2013. Available at:http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?arnumber=6693151
[8] Jun Lin, C. Miao, Z. Shen, and W. Sun. “Goal Oriented Agile Unified Process (GOAUP): An Educational Case Study,” in Proceeding of 2013 International Conference on Software Engineering and Computer Science (ICSECS 2013), Yichang, Sep. 27-29, 2013. Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.2991/icsecs-13.2013.9
[9] Jun Lin, Ailiya, C. Miao, and Z. Shen. “A FCM based Approach for Emotion Prediction in Educational Game,” in Proceeding of 7th International Conference on Computing and Convergence Technology (ICCCT 2012), Seoul, Dec. 3-5, 2012. Available at: http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/articleDetails.jsp?tp=&arnumber=6530477
[10] Jun Lin, Han Yu, Chunyan Miao and Zhiqi Shen. “An Affective Agent for Predicting Composite Emotions,” submitted to the 13th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems (AAMAS 2014) Demonstration Track. Demo site: http://www.linjun.net.cn/affectiveagent/
[11] Jun Lin, Chunyan Miao, and Han Yu. “A cloud and agent based architecture design for an educational mobile SNS game,” in Proceeding of Edutainment Technologies, Educational Games and Virtual Reality/Augmented Reality Applications (Edutainment 2011), pp212-219. Taipei, 2011. Available at: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2040498