Building 113, in the Redmond Campus.

Heiser, J., Tversky, B. and Silverman, M. (2004). Sketches for and from collaboration. In J. S. Gero, B. Tversky, and T. Knight (Editors). Visual and spatial reasoning in design III. Pp. 69-78. Sydney: Key Centre for Design Research [pdf]
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This paper report an interesting experimental study on how people might use a visualization to solve a collaborative task. The authors sketch a couple of important points about diagrams: sketches maintain an active focus on the task; pointing over the diagram assured a visual grounding on the part of the map being discussed; the use of the pointers of the map discharged cognitively the task. The experimental study confirmed that the possibility to face the task facte-to-face on the same map increased drammatically the performances of dyads over remote dyads.

Two interesting pointers in the paper: the uathors used other participants to evaluate the aesthetic effectiveness of the maps produced in the experiment; finally the authors pointed out that even if the task was a spatial one the findings seems to be applicable also to non spatial tasks.

Technorati Tags: software visualizations, cognitive science, diagrams

T. LaToza, G. Venolia, R. de Line. Maintaining mental models: a study of developer work habits. ICSE ’06: Proceeding of the 28th international conference on Software engineering, Shangai, China, 2006. [pdf]
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This paper present the analysis of the study of developer work habits. Using two questionnaires and an interview cycle, the authors gathered a large amount of data from the Microsoft developer community.

Among the most striking results the authors highlighted the attitude that developers have to be bound to the written form of the code. Additionally for protecting their work from external and unpredictable sources of mistakes, a strong feeling of ownership arise first at the individual level and then at the group level. Specifically on the visualization of the code, the authors note that despite the availability of high-level views of code and visual editors such as tools for UML, developers remain focused on the code itself.

Another interesting idea from the paper is that developers keep an intricate mental model of the code in their head and in transient forms such as whiteboards and sketches.

Technorati Tags: software visualization, code ownership, data mining, collaborative development

WinDiff is a graphical diff-like program published by Microsoft, and is distributed with certain versions of Microsoft Visual Studio and with the latest Service Pack. It is often criticized for its user interface, which doesn’t abide by system color settings or visual styles and is widely believed to be crude and unconfigurable. All settings, some of which would not have been out-of-place on a toolbar, have been placed in menus. Still, WinDiff is considered an improvement over the text-based diff-utilities like FC and diff that preceded it. (source, wikipedia)

WinMerge seems to be a valid alternative.

Microsoft Live latest update included a new feature called “Collections”: a tool which allows you to save your pushpins, search results, and other map notes into collections, which can then be shared with others.

Daniel M. German , Davor Cubrani? , Margaret-Anne D. Storey, A framework for describing and understanding mining tools in software development, ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes, v.30 n.4, July 2005 [pdf]
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This paper present a framework for comparing visualization tools that provide awareness
for human activities in software development. Awareness is defined as an understanding of the activities of the others which provides the context for one’s own activity. According to the authors, awareness provides information on who is doing what and on which artifacts. The paper reviews the state of the art of systems that have been developed to provide awareness during software development. The general conclusions of the review are that there is a need for requirements, the desiderable features that should be provided by an awareness tool.A second conclusion is that there is the need to find good sources of facts that can be used to construct the representations. Additionally some deeper research is required to understand how to combine different visualizations in a way that can be used by the users to answer the question s/he might have. Finally there is the need for more specific and deep evaluation of the effectiveness of such systems.

Technorati Tags: software visualization

In this paper [1], Latour inscriptions are defined as the process by which social practices and technological artifacts become inextricably intertwined: the structure of the system mirrors the structure of the organization who has produce it.

[1] De Souza, C., Froehlich, J., and Dourish, P. 2005. Seeking the Source: Software Source Code as a Social and Technical Artifact. Proc. ACM Conf. Supporting Group Work GROUP 2005 (Sanibel Island, FL.)

R. De Line, M. Czerwinski, B. Myers, G. Venolia, S. Drunker, and G. Robertson. Code Thumbnails: Using Spatial Memory to Navigate Source Code. In Proceedings of IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing 2006.
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The paper presents a method called Code Thumbnails for supporting code navigation and understanding. The main idea of this approach is to represent a mini map of the code in the developer suite. The shape of the text can act as a visual landmark to support perceptually the navigation activity. The article build upon a large body of research on spatial memory and spatial cognition, where different studies have shown that adding real world landmark can greately benefit navigation in virtual reality.To evaluate the impact of this visualization, the author asked a number of developers to identify and correct a certain part of a code in a given amount of time. They used two independent variables: the presence of the landmarks and the file versus the method type for the visualization. Results showed significants effects for the variables.

Technorati Tags: software visualization

Robert DeLine, “Staying oriented with Software Terrain Maps,” Proceedings of Workshop on Visual Languages and Computation 2005. [pdf]
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Developers often find themselves lost as they navigate around large programs, particularly when those programs are unfamiliar. This paper presents a new visualization, called a software terrain map, intended to keep a programmer oriented as she navigates around source code in the editor. The design is based on the metaphor of cartographic maps, which are continuous (no wasted space), have enough visual landmarks to allow the user to find her location perceptually rather than cognitively, and lend themselves to overlaying data. Although an optimal layout for software terrain maps is computationally intractable, the paper presents an efficient, heuristic algorithm that produces good results.

Tags: software visualization

These last days have been crazy. Rushing to be ready for the STAMPS trial, relocating to Seattle and loosing a bag in less than 48 hrs is something everybody should experience!

Finally we are here. Completely jet-lugged but happy for this starting adventure.