WorkshopsCSEE&T 2023

Further information on each workshop can be found on the workshops’ websites.

• Making Secure Development Practices Fun and Engaging
• “Business Programming” - Critical Factors from Zero to Portable GUI Programming in Four Hours
• Bad Smells in Software Engineering Education

Making Secure Development Practices Fun and Engaging

Organizer: Jessie Auguste

“Making Secure Development Practices Fun and Engaging” is a workshop that explores ways to integrate security into the development process in a way that is enjoyable and engaging for teams of software engineers.

As software development becomes increasingly complex and interconnected, ensuring the security of applications is more important than ever. However, it can be difficult to get developers to prioritize security, especially when it is seen as a burden or an afterthought. This talk aims to change that perception by demonstrating how security can be made into a fun and engaging part of the development process. Through interactive exercises and real-world examples, attendees will learn how to create a culture of security within their organization and how to make security practices an integral part of their development workflow. Attendees will also learn how to use tools and resources to make security testing and code reviews more efficient and effective.

By the end of this workshop, attendees will have a new appreciation for the role of security in development and will have a set of practical strategies for making secure development practices a more enjoyable and integral part of their work. Teaching secure coding principles is an essential component of ensuring software security. Software engineers must be equipped with knowledge of secure coding principles to develop secure software. The abstract discusses the impact of insecure coding practices and the need for secure coding principles.

The workshop highlights the current state of software security and the role of insecure coding practices in software vulnerabilities. Insecure coding practices have led to numerous security breaches, causing financial losses and reputational damage. These vulnerabilities have also resulted in a loss of trust from consumers, who now demand secure software. Collaboration is encouraged, to share obstacles and solutions that attendees have had when teaching secure coding fundamentals. Covering highlights of some of the critical secure coding principles that software engineers should know, such as input validation, secure data storage, and access control. Attendees will leave with a solid understanding that teaching secure coding principles to software engineers is crucial in developing secure software. Software engineers who understand secure coding principles can build secure software that meets user expectations, improves the organization’s reputation, and protects against potential cyber threats.

“Business Programming” - Critical Factors from Zero to Portable GUI Programming in Four Hours

Organizer: Rony G. Flatscher

At the Vienna University of Economics and Business Administration, Bachelor students can learn programming from scratch and are thus able to create portable GUI programs for Windows, MacOS and Linux in just one semester. This is possible within 60 hours (4 hours per week) of class attendance (“contact hours”) and a total learning load of 200 hours, which corresponds to 8 ECTS (European Credit Transfer System). Several critical success factors make this possible, including the course objectives, the course structure, the pedagogical principles, and finally the programming language used.

This workshop shares experiences and insights from a 35-year evolution of the programming class. Attendees will be able to understand key aspects of the course that they can apply to their own teaching. In addition, in the spirit of open education, all slides and nutshell examples are freely available and will be presented shortly such that attendees can adapt them for their own courses.

Anticipated length: Three hours (with optional a “hands-on” hour)

Bad Smells in Software Engineering Education

Organizers: Dan Port, Rick Kazman

There are a number of common bad practices that software engineering students innocently fall into. Software engineering educators need to detect (“smell”) these bad practices early on and provide students with guidance on better practices before they become ingrained habits that are difficult to change. Some examples of bad practice smells include copying and pasting code without understanding it, employing few or poorly written comments, not following coding standards and formatting guidelines, over-complicating solutions, writing code with no clear purpose, jumping into coding before thinking about the design, writing large blocks of code without testing, and not seeking feedback or assistance when stuck.

Data from surveys and interviews with students indicate that bad practices are common and have real negative consequences. Bad practices can hinder the learning process. And current software engineering curricula and teaching methods may not adequately address them, or may not address them early enough, leaving students to develop bad habits that linger into their later careers.

Enabling instructors to “smell” bad practices and proactively address them can help them to help students understand why these practices do harm in the long run. Thus instructors can provide guidance and reinforcement for better practices within software engineering coursework which in turn can help to reduce or avoid the development of these bad habits.

This workshop aims to explore this issue by soliciting contributions to a shared repository of bad practice smells commonly observed in teaching introductory software engineering. The repository is intended to be workshopped at the conference. Participants should identify the commonly-occurring smells they have observed, along with supporting information discussing their contexts, the harm that they cause, and their remediations.

During the workshop, participants will present their contributions and facilitate workshopping them with the aim of clarifying the bad practices and how they can be detected, evidence on why they are bad, evidence on how common they are, and what guidance (ideally in the form of teaching materials) could be provided for better practices within the context of software engineering courses.

The workshop will produce a coherent and organized set of identified smells, along with recommendations for improving the education of software engineering novices, such as integrating early bad practice smell detection and remediation techniques into curricula, providing hands-on experience with better practices, data collection and analysis, and possible ways to measure improvement.

Workshops