Research Assignment 'Software Ecosystems'
In the master course Software Ecosystems, students have to perform a research assignment in the complex networks of organizations that collaboratively produce and service software, for instance in the open source domain or in application stores.
One group of three students decided to make a study of how mobile platform providers, i.e., Google Android and Apple iOS, implement common privacy measures in their platforms.
Aims
The goals of this course are:
- To get students intimately familiar with the theory of software ecosystems, specifically management, modeling, and simulation
- To get students acquainted with the academic writing and publication process
- To contribute to the collection of knowledge on software ecosystems and graph analysis
- To show students the cutting edge of science in a field and to provoke thought about future developments
Students ec’s for this assignment
7.5EC for 3 students
Teacher effort (hours)
30 hours
Final product
Sharif Kandil, Micha van den Akker, Koen van Baarsen, Slinger Jansen and Paul van Vulpen (2018). Benchmarking Privacy Policies in the Mobile Application Ecosystem. Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Business. (pdf)
Assessment criteria
- How well-defined is the problem?
- How relevant is the literature used?
- How effective is the chosen method and how carefully was it used?
- How convenient is the presentation of the results?
- How useful and precise is the analysis of the results?
- Does the synthesis show how the results relate to the problem?
Description of the example
Students progress is assessed by assessing generic academic capabilities. In particular, the course has several typical academic activities that are assessed with traditional course grades, such as:
- Two presentations
- Peer-review activities in Easychair
- Academic writing assignments
- Data set publication (if applicable)
- Knowledge clip creation
Description of the example
There are several examples of student output in the course, such as the aforementioned knowledge clips. In this case, the output was a research paper that was published at a conference. See the Final Product.
The students funded their own travel to the conference and presented the work there together with me, the lecturer.
More information / Contact
Slinger Jansen, slinger.jansen@uu.nl