Design and Development of Architecture and System Integration for Electronic Teamwork

Assessment Tool e-TAT

Masters Project Oral Defenseby Sanket Parab

Computer Science Graduate Student, SFSU

Advisors/Committee MembersDr. Dragutin Petkovic

Gary ThompsonProf. James Wong

Outline

• Background and Motivation• Problem Statement• Electronic Teamwork Assessment Tool (e-TAT)• Demo with Use-cases• Project Hosting Platform• Architecture• RSS/ATOM Feed Parser• Class Diagram and API• Testing• SE Methods Used• Contributions to e-TAT• Conclusion

Problem Statement

• Rapidly-evolving SW industry requires educational institutions to adopt innovative changes in their curriculums in order to provide students with the necessary competitive skills and experience required in today's job market.

• Important for instructors to teach and evaluate students teamwork and soft skills, and know about how students apply it in real settings during team project development.

• Manually collecting and analyzing team activity data is difficult and inefficient.

Background and Motivation

• SFSU is offering SE courses in collaboration with FAU, Florida & Fulda,

Germany from past several years.

• Instructors here developed composite method to evaluate and assess

teamwork performance.

• Team activity data was collected and analyzed manually.

• No tool exists to automate the process of data collection and evaluation.

• Proposed e-TAT to automate the process of metrics collection and

analysis and started Project with 4 team members.

Electronic Teamwork Assessment Tool (e-TAT)

• Innovative Web Based Tool pioneered at SFSU with easy to use interface.

• Developed by a team of 4 computer science graduate students.

• Interfaces with Goggle Code and Google Groups collaboration platforms to collect team activity data.

• Integrates fully functional customized Survey Tool and Data Mining tools to analyze data.

• Stores data in centrally administered database for future use.

• Generates reports based on collected data (in various formats) for reference by Instructors.

Demo with Use-cases

1. Setup Google Code and Google Groups (overview).

2. Create new Course and add new Groups to that Course.

3. Use Google Code to make a project update (downloads, issues,

etc.).

4. Update e-TAT feeds (through RSS/ATOM Feed Parser) and add

Annotations.

Project Hosting Platform: Competitive Analysis

Project Hosting Platform: Google Code & Groups

SVN Commits

Wiki Updates

Issue Tracking

Mailing List

Discussions

Downloads

Advantages:•Availability •Performance•Quality of Service•Project Update Feed•Communication Tools•Collaboration Tools

ATOM Feed

Architecture

RSS/ATOM Feed Parser

Class Diagram

Internal Data Access API

Testing

Software Engineering

AGILE / SCRUM engineering technique:

•Highly iterative development.

•Weekly updates (meetings).

Object Oriented API development:

•Modular, and hence, flexible.

•Highly maintainable and easy to extend.

User-centered Design method:

•Focus on usability (rather than just functionality).

UI Iteration Example #1

UI Iteration Example #1

UI Iteration Example #2

UI Iteration Example #2

Contributions to e-TAT

• Design of the early Database Schema for the e-TAT application for easy and fast access of

the data objects.

• Design and implementation of e-TAT Architecture.

• Design and implementation of RSS/ATOM feed parser for fetching relevant project data

from two platforms (Google Code and Google Groups) into a single e-TAT database.

• Integration of tools created by team members into the e-TAT application (survey, UI,

reports, data mining).

• Correctness (QA) and the Usability review of the software: Tested application for its

correctness using various testing techniques and had a usability review of the software

from the two instructors and an unbiased representative user.

Conclusion

• Designed and developed e-TAT as an automated teamwork assessment tool for

use by Instructors teaching Software Engineering Practices.

• Designed and developed Project Hosting Platform integration along with feed

parsing functionality.

• Integrated full functional customized Survey Tool and Data Mining Tools into e-

TAT.

Acknowledgements

The e-TAT development team would like to thank their project advisors, Dr. Dragutin

Petkovic and Gary Thompson for their invaluable help, support and guidance in designing

and developing the e-TAT from scratch.

The author would especially like to thank the whole team for putting in several hours every

week and brainstorming during the SCRUM meetings to help solidify the product features.

Help from the Computer Science Department staff at San Francisco State University is much

appreciated, for providing laboratory access and the ability to host the in-development

prototypes of the e-TAT Application during semester terms.

References

1. D. Petkovic, G. Thompson, R. Todtenhoefer, S. Huang, B. Levine, S. Parab, G. Singh, R. Soni, S.

Shrestha : “Work in Progress – e-TAT: Online Tool for Teamwork and “Soft Skills” Assessment in

Software Engineering Education”, submitted to Frontiers in Education FIE 2010 (undergoing final

review)

2. Dragutin Petkovic, Rainer Todtenhoefer, Gary Thompson: “Assessment and Comparison of Local and

Global SW Engineering Practices in a Classroom Setting”, ITiCSE’08, June 30-July02, Madrid, Spain

3. Collaborative Online Project Involvement Analysis [COPIA], Software Engineering (Dr. Dragutin

Petkovic and Gary Thompson), Fall 2008 SFSU, https://ppm-5.dev.java.net/ accessed on 07/15/2010

4. M. Al-Yahya: “Using Wikis to Support teamwork Skills in Software Engineering Courses”, 22nd Conf.

on Software Engineering Education and Training, 2009

5. Orit Hazzan, Y. D. (2008). Agile Software Engineering. Springer.

References

6. Project Kenai: We’re More Than Just a Forge, http://kenai.com/ accessed on: 09/12/2010.

7. Bulmer, M. (1979). Principles of Statistics. Oxford: Dover Publications, New York.

8. Pressman, R. (2005). Software Engineering: A Practitioner's Approach. Mc Graw Hill.

9. "Software Engineering 2004": Curriculum Guidelines for Undergraduate Degree Programs in

Software Engineering, The joint Task Force on computing Curricula, IEEE Computer Society,

Association for Computing Machinery, August 2004.

10. Atlee, J.; leBlanc Jr., R.; Lethbridge, T.; Sobel, A.; Thompson, J.: “Reflections of Software Engineering

2004, the ACM/IEEE-CS Guidelines for Undergraduate Programs in Software Engineering”, P.

Inverardi, M. Jazayeri (Eds.)., ICSE 2005 Educational Track, LNCS 4309, pp11-27, 2006, Springer

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