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Nowadays, SPOCs (Small Private Online Courses) have been used as complementary methods to support classroom teaching. SPOCs are courses that apply the usage of MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), combining classroom with online education, making them an exciting alternative for contexts such as emergency remote teaching. Although SPOCs have been continuously proposed in the software engineering teaching area, it is crucial to assess their practical applicability via measuring the effectiveness of this resource in the teaching-learning process. In this context, this paper aims to present an experimental evaluation to investigate the applicability of a SPOC in a Verification, Validation, and Software Testing course taught during the period of emergency remote education during the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil. Therefore, we conducted a controlled experiment comparing alternative teaching through the application of a SPOC with teaching carried out via lectures. The comparison between the teaching methods is made by analyzing the students' performance during the solving of practical activities and essay questions on the content covered. In addition, we used questionnaires to analyze students' motivation during the course. Study results indicate an improvement in both motivation and performance of students participating in SPOC, which corroborates its applicability to the software testing teaching area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Software Engineering is a crucial topic in undergraduate computing-related courses and provides the basic knowledge and skills necessary for professional practice in the software industry. Teaching Software Engineering principles, concepts, and practices and relating them to real-world scenarios are challenging tasks, and the adoption of Open Source Software (OSS) projects can help to face these challenges. On the other hand, adopting OSS projects as a didactic resource may introduce additional challenges to instructors who are not familiar with the OSS ecosystem. Objective: In this paper, we identified and mapped the profiles of instructors of Software Engineering courses concerning their classroom practices and use of OSS projects in Software Engineering Education. Method: We surveyed 90 higher education instructors in Brazil to collect data regarding their familiarity with the Software Engineering knowledge areas, pedagogical methods and resources used, and familiarity with and use of OSS projects in the classroom. Then, we resorted to data mining techniques, for instance, K-modes and Decision Tree algorithms, to identify instructors' characteristics according to their classroom practices and use of OSS projects in the course activities. Results: Our findings include the characterization of instructors who use and instructors that do not use OSS projects in Software Engineering Education and the grouping of instructors after the application of the K-modes algorithm, and after the application of the Decision Tree algorithm, with similar characteristics of the pedagogical practices. The main result of this work is that the familiarity with OSS projects and the use of active learning methods were characteristics present in the application of the K-modes and Decision Tree algorithms, that distinguished instructors who used OSS projects from those that did not use them in Software Engineering Education. Finally, we confirmed that familiarity with OSS projects could have a positive influence on the instructors' interest and potential for adopting this approach in Software Engineering Education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Technical Debt (TD) metaphor has been an exciting topic of investigation for the software industry and academia in the last year. Despite the increasing attention of practitioners and researchers, TD studies indicate that its management (TDM) is still incipient. Particularly in Brazilian Software Organizations (BSOs), there is still a lack of information regarding how software practitioners perceive and manage TD in their projects. Objective: To characterize TD and its management under the perspective of BSOs using their practitioners as proxies and extend the discussions presented at the 2018 Ibero-American Conference in Software Engineering. Methods: A survey was performed with 62 practitioners, representing about 12 organizations and 30 software projects. Results: The analysis of 40 valid questionnaires indicates that TD is still unknown to a considerable fraction of the participants, and only a small group of organizations adopts TD management activities in their projects. Besides, it was possible to obtain a set of technologies that can be used to support TDM activities and to make available a survey package to study TD and its management. Conclusions: Although the results provide an initial and representative landscape of the TDM scenario in BSOs, further research will support to observe how effective and efficient TDM activities can be in different software project contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]