Reflection Paper Proposal Due Thursday February 7, 11:00am EST
The structure of this class is designed to provide a broad survey of many topics in software engineering practice and research:
- Software Process
- Modularity and Design
- Mining Software Repositories
- Open Source
- Testing
- Continuous Integration
- Devops
- Expertise and knowledge sharing
- Security
- Software engineering in specific domains
The goal of the reflection paper is for you to select a topic of particular personal interest, identify five research articles (that are not required readings for this course), read them, and organize your reaction to the topic in a reflection paper. The reflection paper provides you to an opportunity to apply critical reasoning skills in the context of the research papers that we discuss in class, and to dig deeper into a topic of your own particular interest.
This is not a literature review: the goal with this paper is for you to provide some editorial critiques of the work and express your own opinions, rather than to provide a fair and direct summary of the contents of each paper. The expected length of the reflection paper is roughly 2,500 words.
Before you begin writing (or reading in depth), you will submit a paper proposal, indicating the topic area that you intend to dive into, one required reading from the course that you intend to include, and the five additional readings in this topic that you intend to read.
The articles that you select for your reading list should be selected from top-tier research venues for the selected topic. We will provide you with feedback on your reading list.
Examples of top-tier venues include:
- Software Engineering (broadly construed) - ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), ACM Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE), ACM/ESEC Conference on Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE), IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology
- Human Aspects - ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI), IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC)
This is not an exhaustive list, but may be a good place to start looking for articles of interest - you might look at recent articles published in these venues, or search on the ACM digital library for articles in your topic of interest, with an eye towards these venues.
Submit a text document with the following specifications:
- State the topic that you are focusing on (selected from the list of topics above)
- Provide 2-3 sentences describing your motivation for interest in that topic
- Identify the article from the course reading list that you will include in your reflection paper
- Identify the five additional articles that you will include in your reflection paper. Provide a citation (title, authors, and venue) and a link to the article
A good-faith, on-time proposal that meets the specifications above is necessary to receive a “check” on the paper overall.
This is an individual assignment. The goal of this assignment is to provide your personal reflection to the topic of your choice. Papers that are substantially similar to each other (or to third-party content) will receive a score of 0, with no opportunity for a revision. If you have any questions or concerns of what constitutes plagiarism, please reach out to the instructor immediately.