No abstract

For decades there have been arguments how to teach programming in the basic courses. Supportive intervention methods to improve students' learning and methods to improve assessment process have been widely studied. There are various successful methods to each topic separately, but only a few of them fit for both. In this work, we aimed at validating ASPA a static analyser tool that supports learning and continuous feedback on programming courses. For this purpose, we designed and conduct an empirical study among 236 students enrolled in the basic programming course, that voluntary adopted the tools during the project development activities. We first profiled the students, then, evaluated the attitude toward using ASPA, the perceived ease of use, and the perceived usefulness. Results showed that ASPA is a good helper for the entire course and especially the student's programming assignments, and it also helps to improve the students' grades.

The field of software ecosystems is rapidly maturing and significant numbers of articles are published each year to further develop our understanding of this concept and support innovation through it. The growth of the field also brings along challenges, such as findability and reusability of research results, coordination of research initiatives, and significant review pressure on members of the community. In this mapping study of empirical research methods in the field, we show that few studies do a good job of reporting their research methods and results. Using data from the study, we provide guidelines for performing empirical research in software ecosystems.