Anna-Liisa Mattila

Mobile agents for the Internet of Things

Mobile agents have certain benefits that are especially useful for Internet of Things (IoT). Mobile Agents help to reduce the network load, overcome network latency, and encapsulate protocols. In addition, they can perform autonomous tasks that would otherwise require extensive configuration. On the downside, many agent systems require use of specific technologies and host environments, which complicates using them and implies that special skills are needed in creating agents. In this paper, we propose mobile agents that are based on web technologies in the context of IoT, Agents can move between different devices, and if necessary it is also possible to clone agents to create numerous instances. This enables the creation of increasingly complex configurations, where device and context specific decisions can also be taken.

Improving the delivery cycle

Context: Software companies seek to gain benefit from agile development approaches in order to meet evolving market needs without losing their innovative edge. Agile practices emphasize frequent releases with the help of an automated toolchain from code to delivery.Objective: We investigate, which tools are used in software delivery, what are the reasons omitting certain parts of the toolchain and what implications toolchains have on how rapidly software gets delivered to customers.Method: We present a multiple-case study of the toolchains currently in use in Finnish software-intensive organizations interested in improving their delivery frequency. We conducted qualitative semi-structured interviews in 18 case organizations from various software domains. The interviewees were key representatives of their organization, considering delivery activities.Results: Commodity tools, such as version control and continuous integration, were used in almost every organization. Modestly used tools, such as UI testing and performance testing, were more distinctly missing from some organizations. Uncommon tools, such as artifact repository and acceptance testing, were used only in a minority of the organizations. Tool usage is affected by the state of current workflows, manual work and relevancy of tools. Organizations whose toolchains were more automated and contained fewer manual steps were able to deploy software more rapidly.Conclusions: There is variety in the need for tool support in different development steps as there are domain-specific differences in the goals of the case organizations. Still, a well-founded toolchain supports speedy delivery of new software.

Software visualization today: systematic literature review

Software visualization means visualizing various aspects and artifacts related to software. By this definition a wide range of different software engineering aspects from program comprehension to understanding software process and usage are covered. This paper presents the results of systematic literature review spanning six years of software visualization literature. The main result shows that the most studied topics in the past six years are related to software structure, behavior and evolution. Software process and usage are addressed only in few studies. In the future studying the adoption of software visualization tools in industry context would be beneficial.

Lively3D: Building a 3D Desktop Environment as a Single Page Application

The Web has rapidly evolved from a simple document browsing and distribution environment into a rich software platform, where desktop-style applications are treated as first class citizens. Despite the associated technical complexities and limitations, it is not unusual to find complex applications that build on the web as their only platform, with no traditional installable application for the desktop environment – such systems are simply accessed via a web page that is downloaded inside the browser and once loading is completed, the application will begin its execution immediately. With the recent standardization efforts, including HTML5 and WebGL in particular, compelling, visually rich applications are increasingly supported by the the browsers. In this paper, we demonstrate the new facilities of the browser as a visualization tool, going beyond what is expected of traditional web applications. In particular, we demonstrate that with mashup technologies, which enable combining already existing content from various sites into an integrated experience, the new graphics facilities unleashes unforeseen potential

Designing a 3D widget library for WebGL enabled browsers

Emerging web technologies such as HTML5 and WebGL have rapidly altered the landscape of web application development. Indeed, it is increasingly feasible to develop interactive applications with web technologies only, with no vendor-specific plugins that require separate installation. Moreover, following the generic trend towards 3D systems, it is also becoming increasingly feasible to create 3D content inside the web. However, many of the available options build on low-level facilities, which, while well-suited for demos, complicate the development of true applications. In this paper, we aim at simplifying the development of 3D web applications by designing a 3D widget library that uses WebGL as its rendering engine, and give a sample application that uses the facilities of the library. In addition, we list lessons learned from the design and implementation process.

Discovering Software Process Deviations Using Visualizations

Modern software development is supported by a rich set of tools that accumulate data from the software process automatically. That data can be used for understanding and improving software processes without any manual data collection. In this paper we introduce an industrial case where data visualization of issue management system was used to investigate software projects. The results of the study show that visualization of issue management system data can really reveal deviations between planned process and executed process.

Unified model for software engineering data

Software process data is available in several tools such as version control systems, issue trackers and test and build systems to name a few. Using the data gathered in these software engineering tools would be ideal for collecting different kinds of software processes and product metrics as the data is already automatically gathered by the tools. However, the tools present and store the data in various formats. The data collection methods and interfaces also vary between the tools. This closes the software engineering data into silos and makes it hard to build reusable analysis and visualizations for the data. In this position paper we present a unified model for software engineering data and a framework for data collection, conversion and storing that utilizes our model. The aim of the model is to define a common format for software engineering data which is not dependent on specific software engineering tools or the software engineering process and thus can be used as a basis for building reusable visualization and analysis components. To demonstrate that we can build reusable visualization plugins on top of the framework, we created a timeline visualization plugin. The visualization plugin is used to visualize two data sets from industrial software projects that have different contexts and semantics.