As part of attending and presenting our two papers at the ACM Symposium on Software Visualization (SoftVis) we blogged about the Highlights of SoftVis
We had two papers that appeared in the Proceedings of the ACM Symposium on Software Visualization (SoftVis) which is directly related to Objective 2 of the SPPI project.
- Craig Anslow, James Noble, Stuart Marshall, Ewan Tempero, and Robert Biddle. User Evaluation of Polymetric Views Using a Large Visualization Wall. To appear in the ACM Symposium on Software Visualization (SoftVis), Salt Lake City, UT, USA, 2010.
- Haowei Ruan, Stuart Marshall, Craig Anslow, and James Noble. Exploring the Inventor's Paradox: Applying Jigsaw to Software Visualization. To appear in the ACM Symposium on Software Visualization (SoftVis), Salt Lake City, UT, USA, 2010.
Victoria University of Wellington received another Faculty of Engineering Strategic Research Grant ($3,500) to continue to build Multi-touch tables for co-located collaborative software visualization.
We established the Blog on Software Visualization which looks at all things software visualization including visualizing the structure, behaviour, and evolution of software.
http://softvis.wordpress.com/
We have had some recent success at publishing our research on Agile Project Management.
- Agility in Context. Rashina Hoda, James Noble, Stuart Marshall, Philippe Kruchten. OOPSLA 2010.
- How Much is Just Enough: Some Documentation Patterns on Agile Projects. Rashina Hoda, James Noble, Stuart Marshall. EuroPLoP 2010.
- Organizing Self-Organizing Teams. Rashina Hoda, James Noble, Stuart Marshall. ICSE 2010.
- Agile Undercover: When Customers Don't Collaborate. Rashina Hoda, James Noble, Stuart Marshall. XP 2010.
Over the summer of 2009/2010 Victoria University of Wellington collaborated with NextWindow on a project to evaluate the usability of some of their new technology. The research collaboration allowed one student to work over the summer on an exciting project to explore the new technology from NextWindow.
Following on from our workshop on Visual Analytics in Software Engineering (VASE) we arranged for our keynote speaker Jim Thomas to speak at an invited session hosted by MoRST directed towards New Zealand Government departments. Jim gave a talked more generally focused on Visual Analytics as opposed to the domain of software engineering. One of Jim's main points was to invite NZ university and Government organisations to collaborate with the US Homeland Security National Visual Analytics Centre.
As part of Obejctive 2we are building a multi-touch table for visual software analytics. We are now collaborating with Jordan Hochenbaum and Owen Vallis both musicians behind the FlipMuweb site. They were two undergraduate students from California Institute of the Arts but are now studying towards their PhDs in the New Zealand School of Music at Victoria University of Wellington. They have built a number of multi-touch tables in the past few years. They built the BrickTable which is a multi-touch & tangible user interface table after a conversation between Jordan and Owen, discussing how to sonify data in a way that was both musical and meaningful for the user.
Lots of demos are located on their web site: http://flipmu.com/work/bricktable/
Craig Anslow visited Unlimited Realities(UR) (and David Brebner) in Palmerston North to visit their development shop on Friday 24 July. A demo was given of their Fingertapps software which has been deployed with vendors such as Dell. UR was also recently in the NZ Herald about Surviving the Recession: Unlimited Realities has winning touch. It was interesting to see their products and prototypes. They have been experimenting with projection based multi-touch displays but this is not part of their product suite yet, they are mainly focused on markets where computer displays are being sold e.g. computer desktops. It is interesting to see NZ software companies having this much impact in a rapidly expanding multi-touch world.
Members of Objective 2 are organising a workshop at the Onward Conference (2009), call for papers on Evaluation and Usability of Programming Languages and Tools (PLATEAU 2009).
Craig Anslow presented his software visualization research to a number of Wellington based companies at the School of Engineering and Computer Science Industry Meet and Greet evening on Wednesday 10 June. The outcomes were positive and a summary talk was then given at Datacom on "Visualising Java Software" in July 2009. 
Victoria University of Wellington received a Faculty of Engineering Strategic Research Grant ($5,000) to build a Multi-touch table for software visualization. 
The great Object-Oriented Principles Survey is now closed, SURVEY STATS: 4,822 started survey, 3,783 completed survey (78.5%) at close of survey.
Craig Anslow attended JAOO Sydney in May 2009 where there was a presentation on Software Visualization and Model Generation, which mainly showed the tools created from Michele Lanza's research group at University of Lugano in Switzerland.
Craig Anslow talked at the Wellington Java User Group in March 2009 on "Using Vision to Think: With Web Based Information Visualization Tools" and PDF version of slides.