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Creating documentation is a challenging task in software engineering and most techniques involve the laborious and sometimes tedious job of writing text. This thesis explores an alternative to traditional text-based documentation, the screencast, which captures a developer’s screen while they narrate how a program or software tool works. This thesis presents a study investigating how developers produce and share developer-focused screencasts using the YouTube social platform. First, a set of development screencasts were identified and analyzed to determine how developers have adapted to the medium to meet the demands of development-related documen- tation needs. These videos raised questions regarding the techniques and strategies used for sharing software knowledge. Second, screencast producers were interviewed to understand their motivations for creating screencasts, and to uncover the perceived benefits and challenges in producing code-focused videos. From this study a theory was developed describing the techniques used by devel- opers in screencasts. This thesis also discusses YouTube’s role in the social developer ecosystem, and presents a list of best practices for future screencast creators. This work lays the groundwork for future studies exploring how screencasts can play a role in sharing software development knowledge. / Graduate / 0984 / lmacleod@uvic.ca

Software development projects typically involve repeated interactions among several groups of people. This setting seems well suited for an analysis by means of the standard-model of the evolution of cooperation, the Iterated Prisoner's Dilemma. Computer simulations of a population of stochastic reactive strategies show that the existence of intergroup discrimination can be modeled endogeneously as a result of noise due to misperception of the opponent's move. (author's abstract) / Series: Working Papers on Information Systems, Information Business and Operations

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The software development life-cycle is comprised of a series of successive activities consisting of analysis, design, implementation, system testing and maintenance. During the analysis phase we do planning and requirements definition for the software product. The design phase, which follows the analysis phase, is concerned with deciding exactly how the software will be implemented. However, the actual transition from the analysis to the design phase is not well documented. There exists an information gap between these two phases.In this study, the transition from the analysis to the design phase is explored by using the reverse engineering method which essentially proceeds from the design phase back to the analysis phase. This study is based on the design of an approximately five thousand line project - an Executive Calendar, which is first designed using a computer-aided software engineering (CASE) tool called DesignAid. The transition is documented in order to exploit the isomorphisms between each phase.The end results show that by documenting the mapping between the analysis phase and the design phase, the process of transition from one phase to another could be partly automated. By using the reverse engineering method, the elements which are necessary in the transition between the analysis and the design phase can be easily identified. Being able to identify these elements, one can reduce the amount of effort required to transform user requirements to design, and thus improve software productivity. / Department of Computer Science

A major reengineering goal is software reuse. Effective reuse of knowledge, processes and products from previous software developments can reduce costs and increase both productivity and quality in software projects.This thesis extensively tests five projects produced by the graduate software engineering class at Ball State University. Each project has the same set of requirements.Each project is also analyzed based on subjective criteria, for example documentation, use of mnemonics for variable names and ease of understanding. Based on the outcome of testing and subjective analysis, reusable parts are identified.Metrics are collected on all of these projects. This thesis compares the metrics collected on the modules identified for reuse, and the same metrics collected on the non-reusable modules, to determine if there is a statistically significant difference in those metrics between the two groups. Metrics which are good predictors of reusable modules are identified.Metrics which are found to be good predictors of reusable modules include: number of in-parameters, number of data structure manipulations and central calls. / Department of Computer Science

Several have reported observations that sometimes ignorance of the domain in a software development project is useful for promoting the elicitation of tacit assumptions and out- of-the-box ideas. This thesis reports work putting the observation to two empirical tests. First, a survey was conducted among software development managers of varying experience to determine what software development activities they thought were at least helped by domain ignorance. Second, transcripts from fourteen interviews of presumably-domain- ignorant immigrants to new software development projects at one large company were examined to determine if the activities performed by those with the smoothest immigrations were activities that are at least helped by domain ignorance. The conclusions are that ignorance plays an important role in software development but there are a lot of other factors that influence immigration smoothness.