Papers by Gursimran Walia
A Behavior Marker for Measuring Non-Technical Skills of Software Professionals: An Empirical Study
International Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering, 2015
Managers recognize that software development teams need to be developed. Although technical skill... more Managers recognize that software development teams need to be developed. Although technical skills are necessary, non-technical (NT) skills are equally, if not more, necessary for project success. Currently, there are no proven tools to measure the NT skills of software developers or software development teams. Behavioral markers (observable behaviors that have positive or negative impacts on individual or team performance) are successfully used by airline and medical industries to measure NT skill performance. This research developed and validated a behavior marker system through an empirical study conducted at the Software Factory where users of the behavior marker tool rated video clips of software development teams. The initial results show that the behavior marker tool can be reliably used with minimal training.
Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering, 2015
1 ; {gursimran.walia 2 , Kendall.Nygard 5 }@ndsu.edu; {fabian.fagerholm 3 , max.pagels 4 , juerge... more 1 ; {gursimran.walia 2 , Kendall.Nygard 5 }@ndsu.edu; {fabian.fagerholm 3 , max.pagels 4 , juergen.muench 6 }@cs.helsinki.fi
Workshop on Empirical Requirements Engineering (EmpiRE 2011), 2011
Requirements engineering is one of the most important and critical phases in the software develop... more Requirements engineering is one of the most important and critical phases in the software development life cycle, and should be carefully performed to build high quality and reliable software. However, requirements are typically gathered through various sources and represented in natural language (NL), making requirements engineering a difficult, fault prone, and a challenging task. To address this challenge, we propose a model-based requirements verification method called NLtoSTD, which transforms NL requirements into a state transition diagram (STD) that can be verified through automated reasoning. This paper analyzes the effect of NLtoSTD method in improving the quality of requirements. To do so, we conducted an empirical study at North Dakota State University in which the participants employed the NLtoSTD method during the inspection of requirement documents to identify the amibiguities and incompleteness of requirements. The experiment results show that the proposed method is capable of finding ambiguities and missing functionalities in a set of NL requirements, and provided us with insights and feedback to improve the method. The results are promising and have motivated the refinement of NLtoSTD method and future empirical evaluation.
Journal of Visual Languages & Computing, 2014
A shared interactive display (e.g., a tabletop) provides a large space for collaborative interact... more A shared interactive display (e.g., a tabletop) provides a large space for collaborative interactions. However, a public display lacks a private space for accessing sensitive information. On the other hand, a mobile device offers a private display and a variety of modalities for personal applications, but it is limited by a small screen. We have developed a framework that supports fluid and seamless interactions among a tabletop and multiple mobile devices. This framework can continuously track each user's action (e.g., hand movements or gestures) on top of a tabletop and then automatically generate a unique personal interface on an associated mobile device. This type of inter-device interactions integrates a collaborative workspace (i.e., a tabletop) and a private area (i.e., a mobile device) with multimodal feedback. To support this interaction style, an event-driven architecture is applied to implement the framework on the Microsoft PixelSense tabletop. This framework hides the details of user tracking and inter-device communications. Thus, interface designers can focus on the development of domainspecific interactions by mapping user's actions on a tabletop to a personal interface on his/her mobile device. A user study compared our interaction style with a standard tabletop interface and justified the usability of the proposed interaction.
Social sensitivity correlations with the effectiveness of team process performance
Proceedings of the ninth annual international conference on International computing education research - ICER '12, 2012
Teamwork is essential in industry and a university is an excellent place to assess which skills a... more Teamwork is essential in industry and a university is an excellent place to assess which skills are important and for students to practice those skills. A positive teamwork experience can also improve student learning outcomes. Prior research has established that teams with high levels of social sensitivity tend to perform well when completing a variety of specific, short-team, collaborative tasks. Social sensitivity is the personal ability to perceive and understand the feelings and viewpoints of others, and it is reliably measurable. Our hypothesis is that, social sensitivity can be a key component in positively mediating teamwork task activities and member satisfaction. Our goal is to bring attention to the fact that social sensitivity is an asset to teamwork. We report the results from an empirical study that investigates whether social sensitivity is correlated with the effectiveness of processes involved in teamwork and team member satisfaction in an educational setting. The results support our hypothesis that the social sensitivity is highly correlated with team effectiveness. It suggests, therefore, that educators in computer-related disciplines, as well as computer professionals in the workforce, should take the concept of social sensitivity seriously as an aid or obstacle to team performance and the teamwork experience.
Social sensitivity and classroom team projects
Proceedings of the 43rd ACM technical symposium on Computer Science Education - SIGCSE '12, 2012
Abstract Team work is the norm in major development projects and industry is continually striving... more Abstract Team work is the norm in major development projects and industry is continually striving to improve team effectiveness. Researchers have established that teams with high levels of social sensitivity tend to perform well when completing a variety of specific collaborative tasks. Social sensitivity is the personal ability to perceive, understand, and respect the feelings and viewpoints of others, and it is reliably measurable. However, the tasks in recent research have been primarily short term, requiring only hours to finish, ...
International Journal of Handheld Computing Research, 2012
The usage of PDA and mobile devices has dramatically increased recently. However, mobile devices ... more The usage of PDA and mobile devices has dramatically increased recently. However, mobile devices and PDA devices have a limited screen size, which makes it frustrating to browse tabular data on mobile devices since users have to frequently scroll up and down to find the information of interest. This paper presents an efficient means to present HTML-based tables on mobile devices. Based on the column and row headers, the authors adapt a HTML-based Web table into two adaptive styles. The first style displays all information of a table into a single narrow page to avoid horizontal scrolling; and the second style distributes information to different sub-pages, each of which approximately occupies the whole mobile screen, and thus eliminates scrolling. The approach is empirically evaluated using a controlled experiment. The main conclusions derived from the empirical study are: (1) the adaptive layout styles improves the browsing efficiency for individual subjects as compared to HTML web...
Information and Software Technology, 2014
Context: Requirements engineering is one of the most important and critical phases in the softwar... more Context: Requirements engineering is one of the most important and critical phases in the software development life cycle, and should be carefully performed to build high quality and reliable software. However, requirements are typically gathered through various sources and are represented in natural language (NL), making requirements engineering a difficult, fault prone, and a challenging task. Objective: To ensure high-quality software, we need effective requirements verification methods that can clearly handle and address inherently ambiguous nature of NL specifications. The objective of this paper is to propose a method that can address the challenges with NL requirements verification and to evaluate our proposed method through controlled experiments. Method: We propose a model-based requirements verification method, called NLtoSTD, which transforms NL requirements into a State Transition Diagram (STD) that can help to detect and to eliminate ambiguities and incompleteness. The paper describes the NLtoSTD method to detect requirement faults, thereby improving the quality of the requirements. To evaluate the NLtoSTD method, we conducted two controlled experiments at North Dakota State University in which the participants employed the NLtoSTD method and a traditional fault checklist during the inspection of requirement documents to identify the ambiguities and incompleteness of the requirements. Results: Two experiment results show that the NLtoSTD method can be more effective in exposing the missing functionality and, in some cases, more ambiguous information than the fault-checklist method. Our experiments also revealed areas of improvement that benefit the method's applicability in the future. Conclusion: We presented a new approach, NLtoSTD, to verify requirements documents and two controlled experiments assessing our approach. The results are promising and have motivated the refinement of the NLtoSTD method and future empirical evaluation.
cerc.wvu.edu
Abstract—A controlled study was conducted to evaluate the potential benefits of a social networki... more Abstract—A controlled study was conducted to evaluate the potential benefits of a social networking tool for collaboration within teams while carrying out a major course project. The study involved thirty-one teams that carried out term projects in a Social Implications of ...
Strategies for Teaching Ideation and Ethics in Computer Science
Abstract--Although social, ethical, and professional standards have been included in some undergr... more Abstract--Although social, ethical, and professional standards have been included in some undergraduate computer science departments' curricula for over twenty years, many faculty members who teach computer science ethics classes continue to look for fresh approaches to teaching ethics and social implications courses. Traditionally, this type of course has focused on viewing computer technologies through an ethical lens. However, there is a movement towards placing more emphasis on the social implications of technology. The ...
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Papers by Gursimran Walia