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Example programs play an important role in the teaching and learning of programming. Students as well as teachers rank examples as the most important resources for learning to program. Ex- ample programs work as role models and must therefore always be consistent with the principles and rules we are teaching.

However, it is difficult to find or develop examples that are fully faithful to all principles and guidelines of the object-oriented paradigm and also follow general pedagogical principles and practices. Unless students are able to engage with good examples, they will not be able to tell desirable from undesirable properties in their own and others’ programs.

In this paper we report on a study in which experienced educators evaluated the quality of object-oriented example programs for novices from popular Java textbooks. The evaluation was accomplished using an on-line checklist that elicited responses on the technical, object-oriented, and didactic quality of examples.

In total 25 reviewers contributed 215 reviews to our data set, based on 38 example programs from 13 common introductory programming textbooks. Results show that the evaluation instru- ment is reliable in terms of inter-rater agreement. Overall, example quality was not as good as one might expect from common textbooks, in particular regarding certain object-oriented properties.

We conclude that educators should be careful when taking examples straight out of a textbook.

We have developed courseware for UML/SysML modelling based on the needs of the European embedded/automotive industry. The courseware supports interactive modelling exercises. First evaluations show promising results.

We present courseware for UML/SysML modelling that supports collaborative learning at a distance. Learners can solve interactive modelling exercises and discuss their solutions. First evaluations show promising results.

CRC-cards are a common lightweight approach to collaborative object-oriented analysis and design. They have been adopted by many educators and trainers to teach object-oriented modelling. In our experience, we have noticed many subtle problems and issues that have largely gone unnoticed in the literature. Two of the major issues are related to the CRC-card role-play as described in the literature. Although CRC-cards are representing classes, they are also utilized as substitutes for the actual objects during the scenario role-play. Furthermore; it is quite difficult to document or trace the scenario role-play. We propose using Role-Play Diagrams (RPDs) to overcome these problems. Our experience so far is quite positive. Novices have fewer problems with role-play activities when using these diagrams. Teaching and learning the new type of diagram adds only little overhead to the overall CRC-approach. Although our improvements specifically target the teaching and learning of object-oriented modelling, we believe that RPDs can be successfully applied in professional software development.

Software product line development has emerged as a leading approach for software reuse. This paper describes an approach to manage natural-language requirements specifications in a software product line context. Variability in such product line specifications is modeled and managed using a feature model. The proposed approach has been introduced in the Swedish defense industry. We present a multiple-case study covering two different product lines with in total eight product instances. These were compared to experiences from previous projects in the organization employing clone-and-own reuse. We conclude that the proposed product line approach performs better than clone-and-own reuse of requirements specifications in this particular industrial context.

This report summarizes the results of the eleventh workshop on pedagogies and tools for the teaching and learning of object-oriented concepts. The focus of this year's workshop was on desirable properties of examples and the usage of simple tools. The workshop gathered 17 participants, all from academia, from 7 different countries.