Marcelo Soares Pimenta

What went wrong? A survey of problems in game development

Despite its growth and profitability, many reports about game projects show that their production is not a simple task, but one beset by common problems and still distant from having a healthy and synergetic work process. The goal of this article is to survey the problems in the development process of electronic games, which are mainly collected from game postmortems, by exploring their similarities and differences to well-known problems in traditional information systems.

On evaluating information visualization techniques

Evaluating user interfaces is usually accomplished to detect design problems in layout and interaction. One possible way to evaluate image quality in computer graphics is visual inspection by experts. Information visualization techniques are usually presented showing their use in experimental situations, employing some kind of analysis. Nevertheless, few works have specifically addressed the evaluation of such techniques. This work reports our results towards the definition of criteria for evaluating information visualization techniques, addressing the evaluation of visual representation and interaction mechanisms as a first step.

Convergent Trends Toward Ubiquitous Music

Abstract Current musical practices point to convergent research trends that bring together eco-composition, cooperative composition, mobile music and networked music. We present results of three compositional studies devised to test three musical interaction metaphors for ubiquitous computing contexts: the cup metaphor, time tagging and spatial tagging. These metaphors were developed through a conceptual and methodological framework that places compositional activities within the context of software development. We discuss the theoretical underpinnings of our approach and propose ubiquitous music as a frame of reference for this type of research.

Is agility out there?: agile practices in game development

Game development is a very complex and multidisciplinary activity and surely the success of games as one of most profitable areas in entertainment domain could not be incidentally. The goal of this paper is to investigate if (and how) principles and practices from Agile Methods have been adopted in game development, mainly gathering evidences through Postmortem Analysis (PMA). Then we describe how we have conducted PMA in order to identify the good practices adopted in several game development projects. The results are discussed, comparing similarities and differences on how these practices are taken in account in (traditional) software development and game development.

Houston, we have a problem...: a survey of actual problems in computer games development

This paper presents a survey of problems found in the development process of electronic games. These problems were collected mainly from game postmortems and specialized litterature on game development, allowing a comparison with respect to well-known problems in the traditional software industry.

User-Centered Evaluation of Information Visualization Techniques: Making the HCI-InfoVis Connection Explicit

In the last decade, the growing interest in evaluation of information visualization techniques is a clear indication that usability and user experience are very important quality criteria in this context. However, beyond this level of agreement there is much room for discussion about how to extend the variety of usability evaluation approaches for assessing information visualization techniques, and how to determine which ones are the most effective, and in what ways and for what purposes. In this chapter we take a user centered, Human-Computer Interaction-based perspective to discuss usability evaluation of information visualization techniques. We begin by presenting a singular view of the evolution of visualization techniques evaluation, briefly summarizing the main contributions of several works in this area since its humble beginning as a collateral activity until the recent growth of interest. Then, we focus on current issues related to such evaluations, particularly concerning the way they are designed and conducted, taking into account a background of well-known usability evaluation methods from HCI to help understanding why there are still open problems. A set of guidelines for a (more) user-centered usability evaluation of information visualization techniques is proposed and discussed. Our ultimate goal is to provide some insight regarding if and how sound ergonomic user-centered knowledge can be transferred to the information visualization context.

Principles for Music Creation by Novices in Networked Music Environments

Abstract Networked music environments (NMEs) allow experimental artists to explore the implications of interconnecting their computers for musical purposes. Despite an evident progress in recent years of networked music research, very little attention has been paid to a very common potential kind of user: novices in music, that is, users with little or no previous music knowledge. Indeed, the same way that principles of Rich Internet Applications like YouTube and Flickr have turned the passive user into an active producer of content, we are investigating the issues to be considered by networked music environments in order to allow effective support of musical creation and experimentation by novices. CODES—a Web-based environment designed to support cooperative ways of music creation by novices—puts these principles into practice. The goal of this paper is to present, discuss and illustrate two main principles: (1) music creation by novices should be prototypical; and (2) music creation by novices should be cooperative. These principles have emerged during CODES design and development and we think they are a good starting point for further investigation of a novice-oriented perspective of NME dimensions.

Personalized e-Learning Environments: Considering Students' Contexts *

Personalization in e-learning systems is vital since they are used by a wide variety of students with different characteristics. There are several approaches that aim at personalizing e-learning environments. However, they focus mainly on technological and/or networking aspects without caring of contextual aspects. They consider only a limited version of context while providing personalization. In our work, the objective is to improve e-learning environment personalization making use of a better understanding and modeling of the user’s educational and technological context using ontologies. We show an example of the use of our proposal in the AdaptWeb system, in which content and navigation recommendations are provided depending on the student’s context.

Searching for Opportunities of Refactoring Sequences: Reducing the Search Space

During software development and evolution activities, the developers focus the refactoring efforts on choosing and applying refactoring patterns (or sequences of patterns) that are likely to improve the software quality. Considering the search for opportunities of refactoring sequences,the main problem is the size of the search space (there are too many possible sequences to be evaluated). We propose an approach to narrow the number of refactoring sequences by discarding those that semantically does not make sense and avoiding those that lead to the same results. We provide a detailed example of the approach considering sequences for method manipulation, showing how the number of sequences can be significantly reduced.

An empirical study of aspect-oriented metrics

Metrics for aspect-oriented software have been proposed and used to investigate the benefits and the disadvantages of crosscutting concerns modularisation. Some of these metrics have not been rigorously defined nor analytically evaluated. Also, there are few empirical data showing typical values of these metrics in aspect-oriented software. In this paper, we provide rigorous definitions, usage guidelines, analytical evaluation, and empirical data from ten open source projects, determining the value of six metrics for aspect-oriented software (lines of code, weighted operations in module, depth of inheritance tree, number of children, crosscutting degree of an aspect, and coupling on advice execution). We discuss how each of these metrics can be used to identify shortcomings in existing aspect-oriented software.