Towards cloud learning with ETC and Jazzhub

Transcription

1 Towards cloud learning with ETC and Jazzhub Giorgio Galli 1, Ferdinando Gorga 1, Paolo Maresca 2, Carla Milani 1, 1 IBM, Italy, {Giorgio_Galli, Ferdinando_Gorga, Carla_Milani }@it.ibm.com 2 DIS, Dipartimento di Informatica e Sistemistica, Università di Napoli Federico II, Via Claudio 21, Napoli, Italy {Paolo.Maresca}@unina.it Abstract. Collaboration is considered as a teaching strategy but, in many cases such as in the programming and software engineering classes, collaboration has to be a learning outcome itself, since students must acquire a specific ability in team working. Thus a suited working environment is needed, that has to be much more than just a flexible Learning Management System. Consequently, a specific project has been launched within the Eclipse italian community in the framework of the Enforcing Team Cooperation (ETC) activity. The aim of the project is that of enforcing and enlarging cooperation activities among a large number of students, all attending programming and software engineering courses at different Universities in Italy. The main idea behind the project is the implementation of a really effective Computer Supported Collaborative Learning (CSCL) paradigm, to be used for higher education on team cooperation, in software engineering classes for the analysis, design, and development of software programs along their lifecycle. The project, in cooperation with IBM Italy as part of IBM's Academic Initiative and the Italian Eclipse community, has obtained interesting results so far as to build a migration of it into JazzHub IBM cloud platform. In addition, the cloud technology looks promising in order to improve cooperation and formation of student groups on specific objectives besides providing valuable support to the construction of virtual laboratories. This paper will discuss both innovations that cloud technology can provide the teaching of programming and software engineering, and first impressions of students and researchers who have used it. Keywords: Cloud computing, Eclipse-Jazz, Team Cooperation, E-learning. 1 Introduction Cloud computing seems to be a promising technology that offers the ease in building cooperation and development environments quickly without doing any installation on local computers. At present, researchers agree that this technology is here to stay because of the unprecedented opportunities provided to achieve economies of scale never conceived before [1]. Many vendors are available on the market cloud, among these we remember: Microsoft, HP, IBM, Amazon, Salesforce, Google, VMware and

2 Netup. Among the first workload that are migrating to the cloud we have: and collaboration, development, testing and vertical industry solutions. It 'also true that cloud amplifies many problems that are themes of research both in universities and industries. Cloud adopters continue seeking to solve problems of security, integration and data quality of their cloud computing [2], but also a new list of challenges are growing, mainly around the problem of cloud-to-cloud integration, user productivity and porting information to mobile devices. Cloud represents a drastic shift in terms of new possibilities it enables [3] the promise is not just to make something more cheaply, but to achieve it in a fast, simple, effective and more flexible way than we have never seen before. The cloud should have a profound effect in the way people think about the use of computing especially when you can consume a platform as a service (PaaS) from any data center in any location and with any device. Mobility / cloud ecosystem has the aims to provide infrastructure, platforms and software as a service, allowing more people to benefit from access to information from anywhere[4]. The university system tends to be increasingly made up of students who benefit from mobile services. It's clear that the challenges involved are making sure the services, protect infrastructure from attack and to protect private data and privacy of anyone. IBM, with its Academic Initiative program, is interconnecting the universities and also with the help of open source communities such as Eclipse ecosystem [5,6] is focusing on research and training of high quality. Spohrer in [7] measures the vitality of this program through a paradigm of 5 R. When the interconnection between the universities is strong it is observed that the growth of the vitality is susceptible. This happened in the project ETC [8]. ETC stand for Enforcing Team Cooperation (ETC) using rational software tools into software engineering [8,9]. At the actual prototypal stage, 6 Universities in Italy are involved in the pilot project. In more details, the participants are the following: Federico II, Napoli, Milano Bicocca; Bologna Alma Mater, Bergamo; Genoa and his Savona campus; Bari and his Taranto campus. The students signed-up into the platform are 535 and they all will keep working along the entire second semester of the on-going academic year, after having started in the first semester. Each University has gone forming developments teams by merging together students from different courses: Software Engineering from the Universities of Naples Federico II, Bologna and Milan Bicocca; Web Design from the Universities of Genoa and Bari; Advanced Programming from the University of Bergamo. Heterogeneous and distributed teams must be composed with students from different cities and with one teacher tutor for each. In addition, for each University, a Champion Student (tipically a computer engineering or computer science, Ph.D. student) is chosen to support the corresponding teacher. Besides, the Champion Student is the responsible of the local group. One only computer engineering Ph.D. student (administrator) has the technical direction for the overall ETC platform, for what concerns both software and hardware configurations and resources. In the new JazzHub [10], powered by IBM Rational Team Concert, a team based development solution for both traditional and agile planning, gives software and systems engineering students tools that make software development and deployment a truly social experience. JazzHub allows university teams to develop directly on IBM's Jazz.net website with no fee. Jazz is an open platform designed to support any participant who wants to improve the software development process [11]. On

3 JazzHub, registered university teams can begin development in under a minute. At the moment the following academic institutions, with their specific goals, are participating in the JazzHub Beta Program: - North Carolina State University will use the JazzHub in future curriculum projects [12]. The institute previously used Jazz for research, analyzing information about artifacts, and in an online course in Agile software development. - Tecnológico de Monterrey (Mexico) and the University of Macedonia (Greece) will participate in joint development work with the JazzHub to promote collaboration between students across international borders. - University of Naples Federico ll (Italy) is undergoing a project with seven other local universities, entitled Enforcing Team Cooperation (ETC), which is using the disciplines of software engineering in a collaborative environment to create new applications. JazzHub, in its beta version, will enable students from different universities to cooperate in the cloud developing projects at no cost. There are currently 41 active projects. The remaining part of the work is organized as follows: Section 2 explores cloud computing, and describes the strategies adopted by IBM. Section 3 discusses the first impressions given by teachers and students in the use of cloud in the project OTRE (a project within the ETC initiative). Section 4 offers conclusions and future developments. 2 Cloud computing and IBM strategies In the last decade Software became one of the main components that contribute to transform business across the industry spectrum. From the manufacture and sale of goods to energy conservation and financial services, we assisted to this transformation with an incredible speed, increased data elaboration capacity and intelligent. While such progress creates new business opportunities and also paths toward competitive advantage, a company s underlying IT delivery model must be resilient and flexible enough to support the associated and often dramatic business changes [13]. Tradition enterprise tends to pull together resources and deploy them in support of a business function workload on project at a time, or in silos. The resources are dedicated to the workload and are unable to support other workloads where they could be leveraged as added support. So what is really different about cloud computing? A Cloud computing on the other hand leverages a pooled resources environment that uses virtualization in order for the physical assets to support multiple workloads, see fig.1. In order to drive efficiency of the delivery to enable the self-service, self-management of cloud computing requires standardization of the assets (hw, sw, delivery) as well as automation. This is what delivers a responsive end user experience. So from the end users point of view it is elastic in scalability, accessible from any device, anywhere, any time, and if charged pay only for what they use during the time they are using it.

4 From a provider s perspective its about an environment of highly virtualized resources that are location independent and have automated service management to handle provisioning, de-provisioning, change management, security and overall environment controls. Fig. 1 Schema of tradition workload and infrastructure compared with Cloud computing Cloud computing represent the emerging answer to the need for such flexibility, providing a highly automated, dynamic delivery of IT services. Companies are leveraging the massive scalability and collaboration capabilities of cloud computing to solve problems in ways that just weren t possible before. It helps organizations get the most out of their existing hardware resources ands peed time to market for new services and capabilities. Cloud computing is enabling organization to do more with less. With the promises that the cloud delivers, many companies are considering building their own clouds some private for corporate use only and some public for their customers and users outside of their firewall. Through [14]: 11 cloud development labs around the world. over 200 IBM researchers working on breakthroughs in cloud security and privacy. Invested more than $3 billion in key cloud acquisitions, including: WebDialogs, ThinkDynamics, Outblaze, Cast Iron Systems, Coremetrics, Unica, Sterling Commerce, ISS, Arsenal, Diligent Technologies. IBM is helping leading companies to design, create and use cloud models, infrastructure and services. Not just to improve their efficiency and cost effectiveness, but also to drive transform their businesses. In particular IBM is focusing attention in solution and services for: Consolidation and Virtualization of Infrastructure and Applications Providing the infrastructure, platform and managed services that enable consolidation and virtualization of cloud environments and applications

5 Standardizing the configuration and deployments of topologies, patterns, and workloads for faster time to market and service delivery Optimized Workloads Providing the expertise and capabilities to migrate, build, deploy and manage workloads and the new business models they enable across heterogeneous infrastructures. Providing integrated, heterogeneous infrastructure to execute the workloads on the best fit platform Seamless integration across cloud environments Integrating traditional and cloud delivery models to provide a seamless user experience Monitoring hybrid environments to optimize workload Management Consistent integrity and security Monitoring the underlying architecture and infrastructure to reduce threats. In a multi-tenant environment, ensuring that the tenants cannot accidently or maliciously impact one another. Applying a standard, unyielding security policy to all of a company s databases hosted in a cloud environment to protect them from leaks and exposures. But, What about the cloud for the Application LifeCycle Management and related SoftwareDevelopment and delivery organizations? How the cloud can be used to streamline and enhance the work of software developers and delivery today? Today, Geographically dispersed development and delivery teams are being asked to respond to changes in the marketplace more quickly with fewer resources and while delivering more value applications with increased quality. In this scenario many IT managers need to: Reduce the capital and operational expense of IT systems and resources for software development through an increased efficiency and utilization Quickly deploy an infrastructure for Software Development to support rapidly changing and new project needs. Governing software best practices for corporate governance and dealing with concerns regarding regulatory and security compliance. Produce application that can be easily deployed on the new infrastructure model. To overcome these obstacles, developers and delivery team need new ways to work more efficiently. IT managers must leverage dynamic, agile infrastructures to respond to rapid marketplace changes and evolving business requirements. Cloud represent also for Software Development a valid and proven answer to this needs. IBM Rational approach to Software Development and delivery and cloud, can be categorize into 3 different categories [14] see fig. 2, mainly.

6 ON the cloud This is tools running on a cloud infrastructure, such as running a full Application LifeCycle Management platform on a cloud environment, as your hardware resource infrastructure. FOR the cloud is preparing applications to run on a cloud infrastructure. Thus, meaning that the tools and capabilities you are using are taking the cloud infrastructure into account in preparation for deployment. LEVERAGING the cloud This is exploiting the elastic nature of a cloud infrastructure. Thus, in this category the cloud infrastructure is a more integrated part of the capability s solution. An example of this one is performance testing or dev / test lab provisioning. These elastic nature of the cloud offers new and unique capabilities not available in traditional data centers. Fig. 2 IBM approach to Software Development and delivery for and on the Cloud IBM Rational Platform provides comprehensive to for a collaborative application lifecycle management (ALM), from Requirement to Test and Deploy. Which you can provision as a service on the cloud (private or plublic 1 ). These services provide you with tooling specifically designed to handle different workloads and development and delivery activities and are based on the IBM Jazz initiative 2 to transform software delivery by making it more collaborative, productive and transparent. 1 For a IBM public Cloud for software development refer to 2 Jazz is an IBM program that is composed of 3 main initiative. A Jazz community ( that increase and facilitate collaboration between end-users communicate and IBM labs. A framework (Jazz) based on OSLC (Open Services for LifeCycle Collaboration ) that provide services for ALM. An third a set of product built on top of Jazz to support the different discipline of ALM.

7 Fig. 3 IBM Rational Platform based on Jazz infrastructure to support a Collaborative Software Development and delivery for and on the Cloud Jazz platform, in fig. 3, exactly exploit the capability described above. ON the cloud Pre-defined, pre-configured images of the Jazz-based integrated platform named Collaborative Lifecycle Management 3 (that include Rational Team Concert, Rational Quality Manager, Rational Requirement Composer, Rational Asset Manager and Rational Build Forge). These allow users to get up and running quickly with these products in a cloud environment. A pattern we are beginning to see more is a desktop cloud solution for developers and/or testers. By providing scalability and on demand provisioning Cloud Computing improves server and resource utilization, thereby reducing administrative costs and labor. FOR the cloud When preparing applications to be deployed to a cloud environment, considerations about topology planning, automation and governance of the deployments come to mind. Cloud adoption is bringing the need to consider what a topology needs to and should look like when it is to be deployed to the forefront, especially due to the desire to automate as many of the steps as possible. Rational provide tool for design and deliver in compliant to Cloud infrastructure. 3 Mode tails can be found at Jazz.net

8 LEVERAGING the cloud In a traditional development environment, test loads are typically constrained by hardware availability to run larger performance tests, more hardware is required to generate the necessary numbers of virtual testers who are accessing the application under test. Conversely, test hardware is likely to be underutilized performance testing typically takes place at specific points of a typical development iteration or project, and the hardware is idle for the remaining time. Studies have shown that test hardware may only be utilized between 10-20% of the time on any given project. Because of this, running large load tests can be prohibitively expensive in terms of license costs (virtual tester packs) and infrastructure With IBM Rational Load Testing on Cloud, for large load tests engineers can automatically provision virtual test agents and generate virtual users on the Cloud from Rational tools. To exploit this capability to a broader community, a new IBM initiative called JazzHub has been started. This is an invite-only beta program for students, professors, and academic researchers. It offers free access to Rational platform on the cloud (in Software as aservice form) so that there is no need for professors to download, install, or configure a server before using in the classroom. Students and professors can enjoy the following: All of the features of Rational Team Concert No download, install, or configuring the server Project dashboards allow professors to evaluate student progress Compatible with both web and client-based GUIs At this stage, each project on JazzHub must be sponsored by a faculty member who is a member of the IBM Academic Initiative [15] 3 Towards cloud learning The ETC project (Enforcing Cooperation Team) had a strong impact on students of the University of Naples Federico II in the year as experimental test then it can spread to other universities of the ETC project [9]. For 2 semester students were constantly engaged. In particular, in the first semester they were active in building a virtual laboratory of programming during which they produced 23 homework by learning to manage the versioning their code. In this activity, students work individually and operated in conjunction, each has developed and versioned total of about lines of code in semester. The lab covered a virtual programming effort equal to 3 credits (CFU). The activities in this phase of interaction was cooperative with teacher and team leaders. In the second half they started software engineering projects that involved 47 students who had been trained in the virtual laboratory in the previous semester. These students were engaged in the development of a 13 sub-projects within the project OTRE (On the road eclipse) [8,9] and here they have acquired knowledge and

9 have developed parts of their project building documents and artifacts by using the tools provided by ETC. Table 1: OTRE sub-projects Sub-Project N. Students Priority State SSIN (Single Sign-IN) 2 high testing RC (Reporting Center) 3 medium testing AVC (Audio and Video Conference) 2 high testing CST (Conference Sharing Tools) 3 medium testing IT (Interaction Tools) 4 medium testing MSC (Managing Scientific Contribution) 2 medium testing Asset Management (AM) 7 medium ongoing (RE&R) Requirement Elicitation, Engineering & Representation 4 high ongoing Advanced Asset Management (AAM) 8 low ongoing (QM) Quality Management 3 high ongoing Testing (T) 4 high started SSIN Portal and Services (SSIN P&S) 2 low started OTRE Portal (OTRE P) 3 high started Total 47 During the second semester has been an unexpected event that is the same group of students was admitted in the trial JazzHub. This project involved a dozen students at once, Fig. 4 shows the snapshot of the project. This opportunity has given rise to the need to reflect on the implications that this opportunity provides innovative in terms of dissemination of the concepts of learning. Meanwhile it is clear that the type of relationship between the teacher and students involved in the projects was of a different nature. The students see their teacher as a coach and very quickly acquire both operating modes offered by the platform as a best practice.

10 Figura 4. Jazz Hub snapshot for OTRE project From the organizational point of view teacher assigns tasks and keeps them through a dashboard that is a useful instrument panel which monitors the progress of students and therefore the proficiency / deficiency of both students and whole team. Through JazzHub you can also share code, version it, and also develop it through the use of eclipse. More generally, however, the use of Jazz Hub, such as ETC, lets you organize projects that are not geographically limited. In other words, as ETC have allowed the project management team which belonged to different Italian universities. Now with JazzHub you can invite people to a project belonging to any university in the world and share content with them. For example, you can share the curricula and programs of a single course. 5 Conclusions and future development It is worth investigating a Cloud computing possible use at the university level thanks to the opportunity offered by Academic Initiative of IBM. Through this initiative could be offered not only software but also hardware which would not be handled locally. This would greatly facilitate the construction and maintenance of laboratories that are to be offered to students during class. In addition, the trial would involve other international universities for the dissemination of the idea behind ETC and then to develop projects and activities during the courses cooperatively. There is a big point, however, overlooks the fact that this platform is aimed at experienced researchers and innovations seem to be faster than we can disseminate them. I mean there and feel a strong lack of teaching materials at different levels. For example there is the need to have a module called Programming in a Collaborative Environment (using Rational Team Concert) in which it is necessary to explain to students how they can organize a programming virtual laboratory and how versioning

11 is done onto common repositories. Another module would be essential of project management (with Rational Team Concert) which is able to explain students how to manage their projects. It is also important to have another module named Agile Development (with Rational Team Concert) in which students learn how to conduct projects of software engineering and particularly agile process (Scrum, Sprint, etc,) but would also be useful as one can handle an Assett in the module Assett organization and dissemination using RTC and RAM that would allow students to handle the artifacts and the skills acquired in their work. Of course, the academy may be useful at this stage for the preparation of real practical lab in these courses after they are tested in a university domain. Through the Academic Initiative provides many courses, but these are especially dedicated to the sector professionals but would need to have courses for different levels of users including universities in order to broaden the audience of people who can benefit from the tools. There are huge advantages to have a cloud structure in a university course. The first is the speed of operation. The laboratory should not be installed and this saves students a couple of weeks between software acquisition and installation of all applications making them operational immediately. In addition, you can stop quickly on the peculiarities of the instruments without having to deal with issues of tedious and often poorly documented tools configuration. In this way, students could concentrate on the course and not on the details of installation tools. Another advantage is the speed of harmony of the team. When the project is started it is easier for a new person to join. Also, the fact that the laboratory will develop virtually don't requires that all students who participate are simultaneously present in the courtroom to begin the activities. Finally, since the laboratory is not real does not require maintenance efforts or the alignment of applications with a considerable saving of time and money by the institutions offering the course. It is worth stopping at the end of this section on the need to rethink the way in which in this scenario should be produced instructional materials. Anything that produces a team can be a valuable educational material, an asset, provided that it is recognized as useful by a team of experts. It may be a web service, and made immediately available to the entire network of students, for the entire community of practice. It is worth noting that among the future developments of the research is to test our learning model. It is a model of cooperative learning and are believed to be innovative as it is applied to heterogeneous groups of students. The groups consist of students who do not belong necessary to the same institution and that could belong to universities located in geographically different places. Of course, the learning model of this project will be compared with other models of learning in order to decide which one work better than other. For this reason we are preparing a plan of measures, which will be a next job. We have confirmation that ETC project is really attractive by the number of students who participated. This will help us to understand how students may perceive attractive this training offer proposed by collaborative JazzHub. We can say that the number of students who participated and used the tools IBM over two semesters were about 300 of which about 150 are used to manage a remote laboratory for the development and management and versioning of code C + + and Java and about 70

12 students worked on projects in software engineering (project OTRE) [8,9,32]. The remaining number of students (about 80) has been involved in supporting projects such as RAM, testing, requirements engineering, test case management, etc. Up to now the number of students participating is growing and is 536 and some of them are already porting OTRE project into JazzHub. References 1. S. Srinivasan, V. Getov: Navigating the cloud computing landscape- technologies, services and adopters, Computer, vol. 44, n. 3, pp , IEEE press (2011). 2. B. Narasimhan, R. Nichols: State of cloud applications and platforms: The cloud adopters' view, Computer, vol. 44, n. 3, pp , IEEE press (2011). 3. Y. A. Khalidi: Building a cloud computing platform for new possibilities, Computer, vol. 44, n. 3, pp , IEEE press (2011). 4. P.Banerjee, et al: Everything as a service: powering the new information economy, Computer, vol. 44, n. 3, pp , IEEE press (2011). 5. Eclipse foundation, 6. Eclipse italian community, 7. J. C. Spohrer: IBM's university program, Computer, vol. 37, n. 8, pp , IEEE press (2010). 8. M. Coccoli, P. Maresca, L. Stanganelli, " Computer Supported Collaborative Learning in Software Engineering", IEEE EDUCON Education Engineering 2011, Annual Global Engineering Education Conference, Amman, Giordania, April 4-6, 2011, pp , Digital Object Identifier: /EDUCON M. Coccoli, P. Maresca, and L. Stanganelli, Enforcing Team Cooperation: an example of Computer Supported Collaborative Learning in Software Engineering, Proc. of the 16th Int. Conf. on Distributed Multimedia Systems, pp , Chicago, IL, U.S.A., Oct , IBM Offers New Tools to Help University Students, Professionals Prepare for Information Technology Top Jobs, Jazz ecosystem, C. Ortiz, Toward a Personalized Graduate Curriculum, MIT Faculty Newsletter, vol. XXII, no. 3, CIO White Paper April - Staying aloft in tough times. Why smart,innovative businesses are turning to cloud computing. Copyright IBM Corporation 2009 IBM Global Services. 14. IBM Cloud. Rethink IT. Reinvent Business. Copyright IBM Corporation 2009 IBM Corporation Software 15. Alan W. Brown Presentation - IBM Rational CTO Europe - Cloud Computing and the Future of Enterprise Software Delivery 16. Academic initiative, P. Dillenbourg, Collaborative Learning: Cognitive and Computational Approaches. Advances in Learning and Instruction Series, Elsevier Science, NY, B.G. Silverman, Computer Supported Collaborative Learning, Computers Education, vol. 25, no. 3, pp , R.E. Slavin, Cooperative Learning: Theory, Research, and Practice. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, M. Hamm and D. Adams, The Collaborative Dimensions of Learning. Norwood, NJ: Ablex, 1992.

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