The Institute of Coding (IoC) is a consortium of universities and employers, with a mission to develop the next generation of digital talent at degree level and above. The IoC will develop higher-level digital skills capabilities among those already in work as well as improve graduate employability. Its goals include developing specialist skills training in areas of strategic importance, boosting equality and diversity in technology-related education and careers and producing research, analysis and intelligence to anticipate future skills gaps.

At Manchester, we are developing tools and techniques for teaching industry relevant software engineering skills, by packaging our existing expertise and through new learner analytics to generate new expertise.

Extending our Git Workflows study

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Following up on our work with Git workflows, we have created a dedicated website to consolidate our progress on building a framework that can be used to characterise and compare Git workflows.

Supplementing our original scope, we are now trying to determine whether our proposed framework can be used to infer the relations between workflows to build a hierarchical diagram based on their characterisations, and compare the automatically-obtained relations with those stated in the workflows’ descriptions.

Understanding Git Workflows

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A picture of a complicated network of Git commits

We have recently begun an extensive evaluation of our tool that recognises the major Git workflows from an examination of the commit and branching patterns in use in a Git repository. We’ve created a common framework for defining Git workflows that allows the relationships between different workflows to be clearly identified and understood. We want to see if the framework is precise enough to allow us to accurately identify the workflows in use on a project.

We’re using repositories publicly hosted on GitHub to carry out these tests. See the project page for more information, and details of our privacy policy and how we are handling the data obtained. This page lists the repositories we are using in the study. If you are a contributor to one of these, please see the data management plan and privacy policy regarding our use of your data on the project page.

Welcoming Sukru Eraslan to the Manchester IoC Team

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Photo of Sukru Eraslan

This month, we gained a new member of our IoC team. Dr Sukru Eraslan joined us from the Middle East Technical University (METU) as a PDRA working on our Learning Analytics Pipeline for Software Engineering.

Sukru’s PhD, and later post-doctoral work, is on eye tracking for understanding how people navigate the Web, to help make it more accessible. We’re looking forward to using his skills in empirical analysis of how students learn core software engineering concepts, and running user trials in assessing the usefulness of the outputs of our analytics pipeline.

Welcome to the Institute of Coding, Sukru!

Happy 1st Birthday, Institute of Coding!

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On Friday, 25th January, the IoC celebrated the 1 year anniversary of its official announcement. The team gathered for cupcakes and some creative photography. (Thanks to Jez Lloyd from our external affairs team for the photo, and to the IoC Hub team at Bath for the delicious cupcakes.)

We also celebrated two new members joining our team.

Kamilla Kopec-Harding is our data science expert. She’ll be working on our learner analytics platform, helping us to understand how undergraduates learn core software engineering concepts, so we can devise more effective teaching materials.

Peter Crowther was recently awarded his PhD from the University of Bristol. He joins the team as a research software engineer, and will be writing Python code to extend our RoboTA prototype to support our second semester course units. He’ll also be working on adapting RoboTA to get our industry competence profiles up and running.

Welcome to the team, Peter and Kamilla!

Welcoming Julio Cesar Cortes Rios to the Manchester Team

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Photo of Julio Cortes RiosWe are pleased to welcome Julio Cesar Cortes Rios to the Manchester IoC team, as a post-doctoral research assistant. Julio is an experienced software architect and manager, who has worked on a range of projects, including fingerprint recognition and biometrics systems for the Mexican Government.  He holds a BSc and an MSc in Computer Science from Universidad La Salle, Mexico, and a PhD in Computer Science from the University of Manchester.

Julio will be dividing his time between the design and evaluation of the RoboTA continuous feedback and marking system, and work on our new learner analytics platform for software engineering.

Welcome to the team, Julio!

New agile coaching game: The Agile Value Hunt Game

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Photo of features and values created by UoM students

The Agile Value Hunt Game in action in our 3rd year UG course unit

As part of our contribution for the Institute of Coding, we are working to package our existing teaching resources for reuse by others providing software engineering education and training. The first of these offerings is now available.

The Agile Value Hunt Game is a coaching game we have developed for use on our third year UG elective course on Agile Software Engineering. The game is used at the start of our workshop on agile approaches to requirements gathering, to help our students focus on understanding and delivering real value for customers.

If you make use of this game in your teaching, and have comments or suggestions for how the game or the instructions could be improved, please do get in touch. We’d love to hear from you.