This paper examines the affordances of a component in a seri-ous game, specifically how one material design choice affectedthe interactions and opportunities for agency and learning. Thegame examined is a megagame, a large-scale (20-100 participants)social learning environment combining board-gaming with role-playing. The megagame poses participants the challenge of creatinga sustainable society, and focuses on developing participants’ un-derstanding of how different stakeholders in a regional energysystem and society are interconnected. Negotiation over conflictinggoals was a primary activity in the game, and agreements wereformalized through paper contracts. Contracts were designed toact as boundary objects between player teams, and defined theirfinancial exchanges. This exploratory study finds evidence in theinteractions between participants that the paper contract systemfacilitated opportunities for participants to develop understandingabout the interdependencies between teams and resources, andto exert agency over their role in these relations. Players activelymaintained and prioritized the correspondence between copies ofcontracts as a means of regulating both the game’s economic sys-tem in the game and their mutual intersubjectivity. Overall, thestudy highlights the importance enabling participants to experiencehow joint actions cumulatively produce future consequences, andhow opportunities for agency and negotiation educate about theongoing global polycrises of energy, climate and social tension.

Many test prioritisation techniques have been proposed in order to improve test effectiveness of Continuous Integration (CI) pipelines. Particularly, diversity-based testing (DBT) has shown promising and competitive results to improve test effectiveness. However, the technical and practical challenges of introducing test prioritisation in CI pipelines are rarely discussed, thus hindering the applicability and adoption of those proposed techniques. This research builds on our prior work in which we evaluated diversity-based techniques in an industrial setting. This work investigates the factors that influence the adoption of DBT both in connection to improvements in test cost-effectiveness, as well as the process and human related challenges to transfer and use DBT prioritisation in CI pipelines. We report on a case study considering the CI pipeline of Axis Communications in Sweden. We performed a thematic analysis of a focus group interview with senior practitioners at the company to identify the challenges and perceived benefits of using test prioritisation in their test process. Our thematic analysis reveals a list of ten challenges and seven perceived effects of introducing test prioritisation in CI cycles. For instance, our participants emphasized the importance of introducing comprehensible and transparent techniques that instill trust in its users. Moreover, practitioners prefer techniques compatible with their current test infrastructure (e.g., test framework and environments) in order to reduce instrumentation efforts and avoid disrupting their current setup. In conclusion, we have identified tradeoffs between different test prioritisation techniques pertaining to the technical, process and human aspects of regression testing in CI. We summarize those findings in a list of seven advantages that refer to specific stakeholder interests and describe the effects of adopting DBT in CI pipelines.

Purpose: The information technology (IT) sector has been seen as central to society's transformation to a more just and sustainable society, which underlines teachers’ responsibility to foster engineers who can contribute specifically to such ends. This study aims to report an effort to significantly update an existing engineering programme in IT with this ambition and to analyse the effects and challenges associated with the transformation.

Design/methodology/approach: This study is based on a combination of action-oriented research based on implementing key changes to the curriculum; empirical investigations including surveys and interviews with students and teachers, and analysis of these; and a science and technology studies-inspired analysis.

Findings: Respondents were generally positive towards adding topics relating to sustainability. However, in the unmaking of traditional engineering subjects, changes created a conflict between core versus soft subjects in which the core subjects tended to gain the upper hand. This conflict can be turned into productive discussions by focusing on what kinds of engineers the authors’ educate and how students can be introduced to societal problems as an integrated part of their education.

Practical implications: This study can be helpful for educators in the engineering domain to support them in their efforts to transition from a (narrow) focus on traditional disciplines to one where the bettering of society is at the core.

Originality/value: This study provides a novel approach to the transformation of engineering education through a theoretical analysis seldom used in studies of higher education on a novel case study.

Climate change is tightly coupled to the usage of energy in differentforms. Creating and using sustainable energy solutions is increasinglybeing recognized as the greatest challenge of our time. Theenergy crisis concerns everyone who consumes energy or servicesthat rely on energy to be performed, in practice almost everythingwe buy. However, the temporal and psychological distance to climatechange has led to a situation where the consequences of ourenergy usage often is considered a future problem or “someoneelse’s” problem. Current methods to increase awareness and understandingof climate change and the need to create sustainableenergy solutions are usually based on simulation or negotiationgames. Methods similar to crisis management exercises are uncommon.In this paper, we propose to use Megagames, large scale socialgames, as a method for increasing the awareness of the challengesrelated to creating sustainable energy solutions. Examples fromtwo Megagame test runs are provided and discussed.

The CDIO Initiative is going through a process of reconsidering and updating the CDIO approach for engineering education development. Previous work resulted in substantial updates of the twelve CDIO standards and the introduction of “optional” CDIO standards. This paper reports on a similar review and update of the CDIO Syllabus to version 3.0. It has been developed by a working group consisting of four sub-groups and iterated and refined guided by feedback from the whole CDIO community. There are mainly three external drivers that motivate the changes: sustainability, digitalization, and acceleration. There is also an internal driver in the form of lessons learned within the CDIO community, from using the Syllabus in curriculum and course development. Approximately 70 updates are proposed, amongst them three additions on the X.X level, namely 1.4 Knowledge of Social Sciences and Humanities, 3.1 Teamwork and Collaboration, and 5.3 Research. 

Continuous integration and delivery consolidate several activities, ranging from frequent code changes to compiling, building, testing, and deployment to customers. During these activities, software professionals seek additional information to perform the task at hand. Developers that spend a considerable amount of time and effort to identify such information can be distracted from doing productive work. By identifying the types of information that software professionals seek, we can better understand the processes, practices, and tools that are required to develop a quality product on time. A better understanding of the information needs of software practitioners has several benefits, such as staying competitive, increasing awareness of the issues that can hinder a timely release, and building a visualization tool that can help practitioners to address their information needs. We conducted a multiple-case holistic study with 5 different companies (34 unique participants) to identify information needs in continuous integration and delivery. This study attempts to capture the importance, frequency, required effort (e.g., sequence of actions required to collect information), current approach to handling, and associated stakeholders with respect to identified needs. We identified 27 information needs associated with different stakeholders (i.e., developers, testers, project managers, release team, and compliance authority). The identified needs were categorized as testing, code & commit, confidence, bug, and artifacts. We discussed whether the information needs were aligned with the tools used to address them.

In the current thematic collection of Högre Utbildning, we present eight contributions on how to change higher education in ways which will enable students to contribute to a sustainable future, including three invited papers on the systematic transformation of higher education necessary to addressour existential societal challenges.

This Innovative Practice Full Paper presents an approach to integrate three critical elements in Computer Science education.The call to imbue computer science graduates with strategic skills needed to address our pressing global sustainability challenges is extremely important, and a great challenge to degree programmes in computer science and software engineering. Doing this successfully requires great care, and possibly several iterations across an entire curriculum. In this regard, learning for sustainability faces similar challenges as understanding scientific results and ethics. Improving skills in searching for, reading, and producing academic texts are often neglected, as are skills in understanding ethics; what norms and values that guide our choices of methods for solving problems. To handle the fact that these subjects (academic writing, ethics and sustainability) are treated separately, and thereby lowering student engagement with the topics, we have successfully integrated them into one coherent subject of Professionalism in Computer Science. By integrating the three subjects, we do three things: a) describe a multi-faceted but integrated engineering role; b) integrate the three aspects of the role we focus on in education and steer away from the view that these are add-ons; and c) increase the motivation of students to take on these aspects of the engineering role.Our approach uses a flipped-classroom style with students playing educational games, participating in discussion seminars and conducting critical analyses of other students’ choices in IT system design. Much emphasis is on the students academic writing abilities, including critical information search and a student peer-review procedure. Also, we do this using an integrated assessment format where teachers from different disciplinary backgrounds jointly assess material from students, which stimulates discussions among ourselves about what and how to assess, and provides a practical way to integrate assessments. We present results from attitude surveys, course evaluations and the contents of the students’ analyses in their final essays. In conclusion, our approach demonstrates a clear shift in how students perceive sustainability, showing that it is possible to achieve changes in attitude towards the subjects as such and their importance for computer scientists.