PPIG WIP 2009 Programme

Thursday 8th January 2009

Lunch and registration Opening address then Keynote Address: Dr Jim Buckley (University of Limerick) Software Visualization: Did anyone ask what the software developers want?

Paper session 1

• "Programmers in the Wild": An Ethnographic Study of How Programmers Scaffold Solving Programming Problems - Christopher Martin & Janet Hughes
• Towards a theoretical foundation for cognitive Dimensions - Maria Kutar & Andrew Basden
• Intelligent support for learning concepts from images - Gabriela Pavel

Tea

Workshop session 1

Two parallel sessions:

• Thomas Green, Luke Church
  Since many games seem to be based on reversing an 'ease-of-use' rule, try designing a game based that way.
• Marian Petre
  The nature of evidence.

Evening Workshop dinner at the Ye Olde Swan

Friday 9th January 2009

Workshop session 2

• Thomas Green, Luke Church
  What's it like programming in near-English? Check out Inform and then create a small world with some events. (Inform is usually used to create text adventures but could be subverted fairly readily.

Coffee

Paper session 2 (3 papers)

• Evolutionary Cohesion Metrics: The Empirical Contradiction - Steve Counsell, David Bowes, Tracy Hall
• Is Identifier Readability Related to Software Quality?, Simon Butler, Michel Wermelinger, Yijun Yu & Helen Sharp
• The professional programmer (and IT worker) Christopher Douce

Lunch
PPIG Business Meeting and close

Invited Speaker

Dr. Jim Buckley is a lecturer at the University of Limerick, Ireland. His research interests are related to the investigation of programmers' information needs in the process of software evaluation.

Topic: Software Visualization: Did anyone ask what the software developers want?

Software visualization is the sub-field of information visualization concerned with the visual representation of typically large, complex software systems. It is used to convey structural, behavioural and historical information about these software systems to stakeholders such as system architects, programmers, and maintainers. In this talk, I will give a brief overview of the field, present several 'state-of-the-art' software visualization techniques and discuss several key issues in this field, primarily to do with the complexity and scale of the information to be visualized.

I will argue that this arena has been dominated by these complexity issues neglecting, to a larger degree, the requirements of the customers (the system stakeholders identified above). Thus I will review the literature on programmers' information seeking, highlighting some stereotypical information needs of programmers that have been identified in this literature. Using these needs as our requirements, we will revisit the software visualization techniques and see if we can come up with some suggestions for congruent visualizations.

Discussants

Prof. Thomas Green

Organizing Committee

• Gabriela Pavel (Local Chair)
• Prof. Marian Petre (Local Chair)
• Dr. Maria Kutar (PPIG)
• Prof. Thomas Green (PPIG)