Understanding Git Workflows

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

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!

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

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

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.

Institute of Coding Launched at the House of Lords

A photo of the Palace of Westminster

The Institute of Coding was formally launched with an event in the Peers’ Dining Room at the House of Lords, on 21st June 2018.  Representatives of the academic partners met with industry stakeholders, current digital skills learners and government, to discuss the UK’s digital skills needs and how they might be met by the Institute.  Baroness McGregor-Smith CBE hosted the event.

A Trouble-Shooter Wiki for Software Engineering Teaching

Photo of Chidera Unigwe

Over the summer, Chidera Unigwe joins our team as a vacation project student.  His task is to develop an intelligent trouble-shooter wiki to help our students deal with problems they encounter in our software engineering labs.

Our second year software engineering course units require our students to get to grips with an industrial strength toolkit very quickly, including Git, GitLab, JUnit, Ant, Maven, Spring, Jenkins and Eclipse.  Chidera will take staff expertise on the kinds of technical problems encountered, and their solutions, and convert them into a self-help resource that all our students can access whenever they need.

The trouble-shooter will be in use by our students from September 2018 onwards.

Welcome to the team, Chidera!