Walter Schilling, Jr., Ph.D.

ISSRE 2006 Student Travel Award

2006

Southeastern Michigan Section IEEE Outstanding Engineer of the Year Award

2002

Toledo Section IEEE Young Engineer of the Year Award

1999

Assessment of the state of Active Learning at MSOE and the Development of an Experimental Inverted Course for MSOE

MSOE Professional Summer Development

May 2013

Real-Time Embedded Systems Lab

University Grant Allocations Program, Rockwell Collins

June 2012

Case Studies for Enhancing Student Engagement and Active Learning in Software V&V Education

Manohar, P.A., Acharya, S., Wu, P., Hansen, M., Ansari, A., Schilling, W.

2015

Two critical problems facing the software (S/W) industry today are the lack of appreciation of the full benefits that can be derived from Software Verification and Validation (V&V) and an associated problem of shortage of adequately trained V&V practitioners. To address this situation, the software V&V course curriculum at the author's institution is being improved via a National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded project. The basic objectives of this project are to enhance the quality of software education via increased student engagement and by bridging the gap between the basic principles discussed in the classroom and the complexity of real world problems. The teaching method utilized promotes higher levels of student engagement and learning through interactive, hands-on exercises, case studies and discussions. In addition, the instructional materials were purposefully designed not only for university classroom settings, but to also be deployed for on-the-job professional training in S/W industry settings, thereby helping to increase the pool of professionals with contemporary V&V knowledge and skills. The new course curriculum enhancement described in this paper is guided by academic research and industry best practices that focus on four specific V&V focus areas: "requirements engineering, reviews, configuration management", and "testing". Among many educational tools that are being developed to achieve the project objectives, the work related specifically to the development of one central component, case studies, is described here. Historically, case studies have been educational tools utilized in business, law, and medicine, but are not as prominent in software engineering. The hypothesis is that case studies would be effective educational tools to introduce real-world professional practices into the classroom, which would help the students in both identifying and solving problems, and developing a perspective on applying knowledge. In this paper we describe a set of V&V related case-studies that we have drawn from industry experiences and developed as pedagogical tools. These case-studies cover several important topics in the S/W V&V domain such as software testing, legal issues in software, software consumer protection, and requirements from the customers' perspectives.

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Integrated Active Learning Tools for Enhanced Pedagogy in a Software Engineering Course

Acharya, S., Manohar, P., Wu, P., Schilling, W., Ansari, A.

2015

Effective teaching requires effective teaching tools. This pedagogical requirement is especially important for software engineering education, where graduates are expected to develop software that meets rigorous quality standards in functional and application domains. To enhance students’ understanding of the needs of the professional software industry, lecture notes are supplanted by additional pedagogical tools being developed at the author’s institution for a software verification and validation (V&V) course. These active learning teaching tools, consisting of class exercises, case studies, and case study videos, are being developed in partnership with industry. The basic objective of the project is to improve software education so that it is aligned with both academic research and industry best practices. This project is being funded through a NSF-TUES grant.

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Assessing the effectiveness of video feedback in the computing field

Schilling, W. W.

2013

Engineering students exhibit a wide array of learning styles across the perception, input, organization, processing, and understanding dimensions. To improve students performance in the classroom, many techniques have been developed to address these variances. The computing fields, however, tend to have a large percentage of students who are visual learners. These students learn best by seeing, and they can perform very well in the classroom with the appropriate usage of teaching styles. However, when it comes to providing feedback to students on submitted assignments, the main method employed is the written comment, which is not conducive to visual learners. This method is most prevalent in the academic community because overall, it is the simplest form of feedback that a faculty member can provide to students. However, written feedback is often highly ineffective at improving student performance, as many students simply do not read the comments because the students feel they are not relevant to their performance. This paper presents an assessment of an alternative method for providing feedback to students: video feedback. In lieu of written feedback, students are provided feedback for software engineering exercises through the use of a short video made via video capture. The video captures in multimedia format the instructors perceptions and actions when grading a given assignment. The video includes both aural commentary as the assignment is assessed, as well as dynamic visuals of the grading process, demonstrating failures and improvements that can be made in the submitted assignment. The article describes the pedagogical foundation for the technique, specifics of the technique used, student perceptions of the technique, and an assessment of the learning gains from using such a method in a junior level class. In general, students are show to prefer the technique versus traditional grading, and an improvement in overall outcomes for the course is shown to exist as well.

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Modeling the reliability of existing software using static analysis

Schilling, W.W., Alam, M.

2006

Software unreliability represents an increasing risk to overall system reliability. As systems become larger and more complex, mission critical and safety critical systems have had increasing functionality controlled exclusively through software. This change, coupled with generally increasing reliability in hardware modules, has resulted in a shift of the root cause of systems failure from hardware to software. Market forces, including decreased time to market, reduced development team sizes, and other factors, have encouraged projects to reuse existing software as well as to purchase COTS software solutions. This has made the usage of the more than 200 existing software reliability models increasingly difficult. Traditional software reliability models require significant testing data to be collected during software development in order to estimate software reliability. If this data is not collected in a disciplined manner or is not made available to software engineers, these modeling techniques can not be applied. It is imperative that practical reliability modeling techniques be developed to address these issues. It is on this premise that an appropriate software reliability model combining static analysis of existing source code modules, limited testing with path capture, and Bayesian belief networks is presented. Static analysis is used to detect faults within the source code which may lead to failure. Code coverage is used to determine which paths within the source code are executed as well as how often they execute. Finally, Bayesian belief network is then used to combine these parameters and estimate the resulting software reliability.

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