Frank Maurer

What makes a good code example?: A study of programming Q&A in StackOverflow

Programmers learning how to use an API or a programming language often rely on code examples to support their learning activities. However, what makes for an effective ode example remains an open question. Finding the haracteristics of the effective examples is essential in improving the appropriateness of these learning aids. To help answer this question we have onducted a qualitative analysis of the questions and answers posted to a programming Q&A web site called StackOverflow. On StackOverflow answers can be voted on, indicating which answers were found helpful by users of the site. By analyzing these well-received answers we identified haracteristics of effective examples. We found that the explanations acompanying examples are as important as the examples themselves. Our findings have implications for the way the API documentation and example set should be developed and evolved as well as the design of the tools assisting the development of these materials.

Eliciting usable gestures for multi-display environments

Multi-display environments (MDEs) have advanced rapidly in recent years, incorporating multi-touch tabletops, tablets, wall displays and even position tracking systems. Designers have proposed a variety of interesting gestures for use in an MDE, some of which involve a user moving their hands, arms, body or even a device itself. These gestures are often used as part of interactions to move data between the various components of an MDE, which is a longstanding research problem. But designers, not users, have created most of these gestures and concerns over implementation issues such as recognition may have influenced their design. We performed a user study to elicit these gestures directly from users, but found a low level of convergence among the gestures produced. This lack of agreement is important and we discuss its possible causes and the implication it has for designers. To assist designers, we present the most prevalent gestures and some of the underlying conceptual themes behind them. We also provide analysis of how certain factors such as distance and device type impact the choice of gestures and discuss how to apply them to real-world systems.

Making the leap to a software platform strategy: Issues and challenges

Context: While there are many success stories of achieving high reuse and improved quality using software platforms, there is a need to investigate the issues and challenges organizations face when transitioning to a software platform strategy. Objective: This case study provides a comprehensive taxonomy of the challenges faced when a medium-scale organization decided to adopt software platforms. The study also reveals how new trends in software engineering (i.e. agile methods, distributed development, and flat management structures) interplayed with the chosen platform strategy. Method: We used an ethnographic approach to collect data by spending time at a medium-scale company in Scandinavia. We conducted 16in-depth interviews with representatives of eight different teams, three of which were working on three separate platforms. The collected data was analyzed using Grounded Theory. Results: The findings identify four classes of challenges, namely: business challenges, organizational challenges, technical challenges, and people challenges. The article explains how these findings can be used to help researchers and practitioners identify practical solutions and required tool support. Conclusion: The organizations decision to adopt a software platform strategy introduced a number of challenges. These challenges need to be understood and addressed in order to reap the benefits of reuse. Researchers need to further investigate issues such as supportive organizational structures for platform development, the role of agile methods in software platforms, tool support for testing and continuous integration in the platform context, and reuse recommendation systems.

SkyHunter: a multi-surface environment for supporting oil and gas exploration

The process of oil and gas exploration and its result, the decision to drill for oil in a specific location, relies on a number of distinct but related domains. These domains require effective collaboration to come to a decision that is both cost effective and maintains the integrity of the environment. As we show in this paper, many of the existing technologies and practices that support the oil and gas exploration process overlook fundamental user issues such as collaboration, interaction and visualization. The work presented in this paper is based upon a design process that involved expert users from an oil and gas exploration firm in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. We briefly present knowledge of the domain and how it informed the design of SkyHunter, a prototype multi-surface environment to support oil and gas exploration. This paper highlights our current prototype and we conclude with a reflection on multi-surface interactions and environments in this domain.

Testing of web services - A systematic mapping

Web services have been gaining popularity since the introduction of Service-oriented architecture and cloud computing. With more and more legacy systems migrating to service-oriented architectures and the cloud, an urgent need for proper testing techniques is becoming apparent. This paper provides an overview of the current state of research into testing of web services. To understand this subject, we conducted a systematic mapping. The results suggest that research into testing web services is still in its early stages. We provide recommendations about holes in existing research that need to be addressed and directions for future research that will have maximum novelty and potential for impact on the field.

A generative layout approach for rooted tree drawings

In response to the large number of existing tree layouts, generic “meta-layouts” have recently been proposed. These generic approaches utilize layout design spaces to pinpoint a tree drawing with desired characteristics in the wealth of available drawing options and parameters. While design-space-based generic layouts work well for the confined set of implicit space-filling tree layouts, they have so far eluded their extension to explicit node-link diagrams. In order to produce both, implicit and explicit tree layouts, this paper parts with the descriptive nature of the design spaces and instead takes a generative approach based on operators. As these operators can be combined into operator sequences and be used at different stages of the layout process, a small operator set already suffices to yield a large number of different tree layouts. To this end, we present a generic tree layout pipeline and give examples of suitable layout operators to plug into the pipeline. A prototypical implementation of our pipeline and operators is presented, and it is illustrated with space-filling and node-link examples. Furthermore, the paper presents results from a user study evaluating our generative approach as it is realized by the prototype.

Interactive prototyping of tabletop and surface applications

Physically large touch-based devices, such as tabletops, afford numerous innovative interaction possibilities; however, for application development on these devices to be successful, users must be presented with interactions they find natural and easy to learn. User-centered design advocates the use of prototyping to help designers create software that is a better fit with user needs and yet, due to time pressures or inappropriate tool support, prototyping may be considered too costly to do. To address these concerns, we designed ProtoActive, a tool for designing and evaluating multi-touch applications on large surfaces via sketch-based prototypes. Our tool allows designers to define custom gestures and evaluate them without requiring any programming knowledge. The paper presents the results of pilot studies as well as in-the-wild usage of the tool.

From small screens to big displays: understanding interaction in multi-display environments

Devices such as tablets, mobile phones, tabletops and wall displays all incorporate different sizes of screens, and are now commonplace in a variety of situations and environments. Environments that incorporate these devices, multi-display environments (MDEs) are highly interactive and innovative, but the interaction in these environments is not well understood. The research presented here investigates and explores interaction and users in MDEs. This exploration tries to understand the conceptual models of MDEs for users and then examine and validate interaction approaches that can be done to make them more usable. In addition to a brief literature review, the methodology, research goals and current research status are presented.

People-Centered Software Development: An Overview of Agile Methodologies

This chapter gives an overview of agile software development processes and techniques. The first part of the chapter covers the major agile project management techniques with a focus on project planning. Iteration planning and interaction design approaches are given special focus. The second part of the chapter covers agile quality assurance with a focus on test-driven development and the state space of testing. Current problems in agile testing, including measuring test quality and testing applications with large state spaces, are discussed.

Learning gestures for interacting with low-fidelity prototypes

This paper presents an approach to help designers create their own application-specific gestures and evaluate them in user-studies based on low fidelity prototypes of the application they are designing. In order to learn custom gestures, we developed a machine learning tool that uses an anti-unification algorithm to learn based on samples of the gesture provided by the designer.