Browsing by Author "Bredl, Paul"

Filter results by typing the first few letters
Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Thumbnail Image
    ItemOpen Access
    Gamification of student development projects in software engineering education
    (2024) Bredl, Paul
    Context. Student software development projects are an essential part of Software Engineering education. They provide students with the opportunity to work on real-world projects and gain practical experience. SCRUM, a popular agile methodology, is often used in these projects. Problem. Students often encounter several challenges in such projects, including learning new technologies and dealing with communication and coordination issues within the team. These factors can lead to a lack of motivation to contribute to the project and a decrease in productivity, potentially resulting in an insufficient project outcome. Objective. This thesis aims to use gamification to increase student motivation to contribute to the project and increase the team’s productivity across sprints. A further goal is to provide valuable project management features tailored to a SCRUM-based development process in an educational context, including features that help coordinate typical SCRUM meetings. Method. We conducted a user and requirements analysis to identify the needs of the students and supervisors of such projects. Based on the findings, we designed and implemented a gamified project management system named DinoDev, combining project management features with game elements. The system was evaluated in a real-world setting in a student development project at the University of Stuttgart. Seven students participated in the user study over the course of two sprints. Questionnaires were used to assess the approach. Result. The introduction of DinoDev increased student motivation to contribute to the project, although the self-reported data suggests that the students’ motivation was already high before the introduction of our tool, limiting the potential for improvement. The data indicates that our gamification concept was more effective for Achievers and Players than for other player types, and the project management features had a higher impact on the motivation to complete tasks than the game elements. An increase in sprint velocity was observed between the sprint before the study and the final sprint of the study, but the results are inconclusive due to the limited accuracy of the students’ effort estimations and the short evaluation period. The implemented project management features and the system overall were well received by the students. Conclusion. The causes of a lack of motivation in student projects are diverse and challenging to address. Therefore, the impact of gamification on motivation to contribute to a student project is limited. While the results suggest that game elements are a suitable tool to increase motivation in these projects, the small sample size limits the generalizability of the results and calls for further research. Providing features specifically targeted at small-scale development projects is a valuable addition and worth further implementation efforts.
  • Thumbnail Image
    ItemOpen Access
    MetaConfigurator : a user-friendly tool for editing structured data files
    (2024) Neubauer, Felix; Bredl, Paul; Xu, Minye; Patel, Keyuriben; Pleiss, Jürgen; Uekermann, Benjamin
    Textual formats to structure data, such as JSON, XML, and YAML, are widely used for structuring data in various domains, from configuration files to research data. However, manually editing data in these formats can be complex and time-consuming. Graphical user interfaces (GUIs) can significantly reduce manual efforts and assist the user in editing the files, but developing a file-format-specific GUI requires substantial development and maintenance efforts. To address this challenge, we introduce MetaConfigurator : an open-source web application that generates its GUI depending on a given schema. Our approach differs from other schema-to-UI approaches in three key ways: 1) It offers a unified view that combines the benefits of both GUIs and text editors, 2) it enables schema editing within the same tool, and 3) it supports advanced schema features, including conditions and constraints. In this paper, we discuss the design and implementation of MetaConfigurator , backed by insights from a small-scale qualitative user study. The results indicate the effectiveness of our approach in retrieving information from data and schemas and in editing them.