We are a sub-group of the Information Management Research Group, in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Manchester. We are interested in teaching agile software engineering at all levels, and have designed a number of coaching games and teaching activities covering core agile skills. We also carry out research into how undergraduate students learn and apply important technical practices associated with agile software engineering, such as continuous integration. Our main basic research focus is in the area of agile testing, with an emphasis on test-driven and behaviour-driven development approaches.
Research Projects
- TResOr: Round Trip Test Engineering Toolkit (with Arm Ltd)
- The Git Workflows Warehouse
- Quality of BDD Specifications
- The Institute of Coding @ University of Manchester
- Test-Only Development
- WOTAn: the Write-Once Test Anywhere framework
Resources to Support Research Impact through Open Source Software
- NEW: Open Source Software Club
- Open Source Software Business Model Workshops: we run 2 hour workshops to help owners of open sourced code bases to identify suitable business models to allow commercialisation of their research. Contact Suzanne for more information.
- With Imago, we run Google-Ventures style Design Sprints. Contact Suzanne for more information.
Agile Teaching Resources and Coaching Games
Teaching agile software engineering at undergraduate level can be challenging. Below, we offer links to some of the coaching games and activities we have developed for us in our own teaching.
These activities are free for you to use, provided you keep the University of Manchester branding in place. Do let us know if you make use of the materials in your course, or have any feedback or suggestions for improvements.
- The Office for Students HE Short Course Trial Project / Higher Education Short Course in Agile Software Engineering
- The Agile Value Hunt Game
- The Red-Green-Go TDD Coaching Board Game
- Role cards for pair programming: Driver Role/Navigator Role
We are also developing a series of free online courses on various topics relating to agile software engineering, on the Future Learn platform.
- Collaborative Coding in Git: this 6 week course gives an introduction to the core features of Git, with an emphasis on the use of Git as a tool for collaboration within a team. The course features video demos of the techniques in action, plus activities and quizzes to test and develop your understanding and interviews with practicing software engineers about how Git works in their organisations.
Present and Past Members
Suzanne M. Embury, Reader in Software Engineering
Julio Cortes Rios, PDRA in Learner Analytics for Software Engineering
Nikos Konstantinou, Senior Software Developer
Current and Completed PhD Students
- Zhongyan Chen, Crowd-Based Approaches to the Assessment of Quality in Software Testing Code, supervised by Suzanne Embury and Markel Vigo.
- Leonard Peter Binamungu, Detecting and Correcting Duplication in Behaviour Driven Development Specifications, supervised by Suzanne Embury and Nikos Konstantinou, PhD awarded 2020.