Milan Nosál’

Despite the effort invested to improve the teaching of programming, students often face problems with understanding its principles when using traditional learning approaches. This paper presents a novel teaching method for programming, combining the task-driven methodology and the case study approach. This method is called a task-driven case study. The case study aspect should provide a real-world context for the examples used to explain the required knowledge. The tasks guide students during the course to ensure that they will not fall into bad practices. We provide reasoning for using the combination of these two methodologies and define the essential properties of our method. Using a specific example of the Minesweeper case study from the Java technologies course, the readers are guided through the process of the case study selection, solution implementation, study guide writing, and course execution. The teachers’ and students’ experiences with this approach, including its advantages and potential drawbacks, are also summarized.

Model-driven software development is surrounded by numerous myths and misunderstandings that hamper its adoption. For long, our students were victims of these myths and considered MDSD impractical and only applied in academy. In this paper we discuss these myths and present our experience with devising an MDSD course that challenges them and motivates students to understand MDSD principles. The main contribution of this work is a set of MDSD teaching guidelines that can make the course pragmatic in the eyes of students - programmers. These guidelines introduce MDSD from the viewpoint of a programmer as a pragmatic tool for solving concrete problems in the development process. In our MDSD course we implemented the presented guidelines. The course shows several techniques and principles of model-driven development in multiple incremental iterations instead of concentrating on a single tool. At the same time we unite these techniques by using a dynamic visualisation tool that shows to the students the whole infrastructure in the big picture. The course is implemented as an iterative incremental MDSD case study. The paper concludes with a survey performed with our students that indicates positive results of the approach.

Reoccurring software documentation fragments called documentation phrases crosscut documentation body and introduce undesired redundancy. The redundancy imposes problems with software documentation development and evolution. We want to reduce the negative effect caused by documentation phrases redundancy by centralizing the documentation phrases sources. This way a documentation phrase will have a single source that can be used for maintenance and evolution. We discuss the nature of documentation phrases and argue for the support of their parametrization. We present a new documentation phrase instantiation method based on source code annotations. The provides free IDE support for writing documentation and is aided by our tool prototype. Our contributions of this paper include identification of documentation phrase parametrization and the annotation-based documentation phrase instantiation. The annotation-based documentation phrase instantiation method enables to reduce the effort needed for documentation development and evolution.