Target selection-based teleportation is one of the most prevalent locomotion techniques in immersive virtual environments, mitigating visual motion sickness and overcoming physical space constraints. However, the conventional Point & Teleport method, widely implemented in commercial VR systems, restricts navigation to planar surfaces, limiting exploration of mid-air positions essential for tasks such as obtaining elevated viewpoints or bypassing obstacles. Mid-air teleportation extends the Point & Teleport metaphor to support free navigation in three-dimensional space, yet the influence of visual feedback on its performance and usability remains underexplored. This paper investigates six different implementations of visual feedback techniques during target specification in mid-air teleportation. We evaluated these techniques through a user study with 56 participants. The results reveal trade-offs between the downward-facing camera, which achieves the highest accuracy, and other visual feedback techniques that rely on occlusion cues, such as the spherical pointer, the spherical boundary, the ground reference cylinder, and the avatar, which result in lower task completion time. We propose initial design guidelines for target selection-based mid-air teleportation based on our findings.

Cross Reality (CR) is a new emerging field based on the current developments in Mixed Reality hardware, especially supported by the broad market penetration of video-based see-through Head-Mounted Displays. It refers to applications that span across different stages (real, Augmented Reality, Augmented Virtuality, Virtual Reality) of the reality-virtuality continuum, where users are interconnected between different stages and/or are able to transition between these stages. This publication follows the concept of other grand challenges publications and reflects the discussion of various researchers invested in CR. After an initial discussion at the 1stJoint Workshop on Cross Reality at IEEE ISMAR 2023, six topic groups have been identified, leading to 22 challenges, which were discussed in groups over the period of multiple months. The discussion of these challenges should act as a road map for future research in the area of CR.

To support speech-based object selection in eXtended reality (XR) environments, we evaluated four natural language processing (NLP) pipelines that vary in their use of large language models (LLMs). While LLM-based pipelines achieve higher accuracy in selecting annotated scene objects, they suffer from increased response latency. In contrast, traditional rule-based NLP tools offer faster responses but lower accuracy. To balance these trade-offs, we designed a hybrid pipeline that selectively routes utterances to an LLM only when complexity warrants it. Results show it maintains low latency for simple commands in our test corpus while improving accuracy for more complex commands.

The paper summarizes the contributions to the AVI 2024 workshop on Prototyping and Developing Real-World Applications of Extended Reality.

The paper investigates how users want to transfer 3D virtual objects between a standard desktop monitor and an augmented reality head-mounted display setup during a Cross Reality session. An elicitation study with 20 participants was conducted to gather their preferred interactions and input modalities to select 3D virtual objects and trigger the transition. Participants were allowed to propose interactions belonging to various input modalities or a combination of interactions that utilize multiple input modalities. We labeled the observed data and analyzed the resulting 1200 input observations to derive a set of recommended interactions. We found that mid-air hand gestures Drag, Tap, and Grab were the most commonly proposed interactions and should be considered as the primary interaction for CR virtual objects transition assisted with other interactions and input modalities as the supplementary base on different user scenarios.

Immersive and simulation technologies, such as Augmented Reality (AR), Virtual Reality (VR), Mixed Reality (MR), and Digital Twins (DTs), have proven effective in enhancing decision-making, streamlining operations, and improving safety through intuitive visualizations. Unsurprisingly, the oil and gas (O&G) pipeline industry is increasingly turning to these technologies to tackle complex construction and resource management challenges. This paper reviews the applications, benefits, and future trends of these technologies, focusing on integration and emerging trends in monitoring, training, maintenance, and testing. It identifies potential gaps, offers guidance for future research, and emphasizes adapting to technological evolution, providing insights to improve system reliability and sustainability in O&G pipeline operations using immersion and simulation methods.

By leveraging the strengths of virtual reality (VR) technologies, we have created a prototype reservoir model analysis VR tool aimed to advance reservoir analysis workflows beyond conventional methods by improving how one understands, analyzes, and interacts with reservoir model visualizations. We present and discuss the results of a usability study conducted with reservoir engineering experts to evaluate this tool and help determine in what ways virtual reality may offer an improved experience over conventional approaches when performing three common reservoir model analysis tasks: the spatial filtering of model cells using movable planes, the cross-comparison of multiple models, and well path planning. The study found that accomplishing these tasks with our VR tool was generally regarded as easier, quicker, more effective, and more intuitive than traditional model analysis software while maintaining a feeling of low task workload on average. Overall, participants provided positive feedback regarding their experience with using VR to perform reservoir engineering work tasks and found VR improved multi-model cross-analysis and rough object manipulation in 3D, indicating the potential for VR to be better than conventional means for some work tasks. They also expressed they could see it best utilized as an addition to current software to assist reservoir model analysis workflows, however, there were some concerns voiced that would be best addressed before VR was fully adopted into their work.

We present a video-based approach for collecting feedback on virtual reality (VR) prototypes. While developing a high-fidelity VR prototype to help neurologists analyze seizure propagation information for brain surgery planning, our neurologist collaborators’ limited availability reduced opportunities for them to give feedback on critical design decisions. In response, we developed a remote feedback process in which developers created videos of the VR design process and used these to ground iterative input from neurologist collaborators. We describe our approach and detail opportunities and challenges for video-based feedback to play a role in future VR prototyping.

This paper presents work-in-progress research exploring the use of extended reality headsets to overcome the intrinsic limitations of conventional, screen-based ground control stations. Specifically, we discuss an extended reality ground control station prototype developed to explore how the strengths of these immersive technologies can be leveraged to improve 3D information visualization, workspace scalability, natural interaction methods, and system mobility for multi-robot ground control stations.

This paper summarizes the contributions to the AVI 2022 workshop on “Enhancing Cross-reality Applications and User Experiences”.

Cross-reality (CR) applications allow users to utilize tools for problem solving that reside on different points of the Milgram reality-virtuality spectrum. Design guidelines for such applications are missing. In this paper, we are proposing a design space focusing on single-user Cross Reality applications as a tool for guiding research and development projects.

We investigate user preferences for controlling IoT devices with headset-based Augment Reality (AR), comparing gestural control and voice control. An elicitation study is performed with 16 participants to gather their preferred voice commands and gestures for a set of referents. We analyzed 784 inputs (392 gestures and 392 voice) as well as observations and interviews to develop an empirical basis for design recommendations that form a guideline for future designers and implementors of such voice commands and gestures for interacting with the IoT via headset-based AR.

Planning for epilepsy surgery requires precise localization of the seizure onset zone. This permits physicians to make accurate estimates about the postoperative chances of seizure freedom and the attendant risk. Patients with complex epilepsies may require intracranial electroencephalography (iEEG) to best lateralize and localize the seizure onset zone. Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data of implanted intracranial electrodes in a brain is used to confirm correct placement of the intracranial electrodes and to accurately map seizure onset and spread through the brain. However, the relative lack of tools co-registering iEEG with MRI data renders this a time-consuming investigation since for epilepsy specialists who have to manually map this information in 2-dimensional space. Our immersive analytics tool, EPES (Epilepsy Pre-Evaluation Space), provides an application to analyze iEEG data and its fusion with the corresponding intracranial electrodes' recordings of the brain activity. EPES highlights where a seizure is occurring and how it propagates through the virtual brain generated from the patient MRI data.

Deep reinforcement learning (DRL) has had many successes on complex tasks, but is typically considered a black box. Opening this black box would enable better understanding and trust of the model which can be helpful for researchers and end users to better interact with the learner. In this paper, we propose a new visualization to better analyze DRL agents and present a case study using the Pommerman benchmark domain. This visualization combines two previously proven methods for improving human understanding of systems: saliency mapping and immersive visualization.

Immersive analytics uses augmented and virtual reality technologies to better understand and interact with multi-dimensional data within a physical space. NiwViw is an application that allows non-technical users to create their own immersive visualizations. NiwViw currently supports the iPad, Microsoft HoloLens, and the HTC Vive.

Generating and maintaining REST API documentation with usage examples can be a time consuming and expensive process for evolving APIs. Most REST API documentation tools focus on automating the documentation of the API objects, but require manual effort for capturing usage examples. Consequently, REST API developers need to know the cost vs. benefit of providing usage examples in the documentation to prioritize the documentation efforts. To this end, we have performed a controlled study with 26 experienced software engineers to understand problems that REST API client developers face while using an API without usage examples. We found that REST API client developers face productivity problems with using correct data types, data formats, required HTTP headers and request body when documentation lacks usage examples. By following the REST API documentation suggestions from this paper, REST API developers can reduce the errors, improve success rate and satisfaction of API client developers.

Gestural interaction has become increasingly popular, as enabling technologies continue to transition from research to retail. The mobility of miniaturized (and invisible) technologies introduces new uses for gesture recognition. This paper investigates single-hand microgestures (SHMGs), detailed gestures in a small interaction space. SHMGs are suitable for the mobile and discrete nature of interactions for ubiquitous computing. However, there has been a lack of end-user input in the design of such gestures. We performed a user-elicitation study with 16 participants to determine their preferred gestures for a set of referents. We contribute an analysis of 1,632 gestures, the resulting gesture set, and prevalent conceptual themes amongst the elicited gestures. These themes provide a set of guidelines for gesture designers, while informing the designs of future studies. With the increase in hand-tracking and electronic devices in our surroundings, we see this as a starting point for designing gestures suitable to portable ubiquitous computing.

Large amounts of data are becoming increasingly available through open data repositories as well as companies and governments collecting data to improve decision making and efficiencies. Consequently there is a need to increase the data literacy of computer science students. Data science is a relatively new area within computer science and the curriculum is rapidly evolving along with the tools required to perform analytics which students need to learn how to effectively use. To address the needs of students learning key data science and analytics skills we propose augmenting existing data science curriculums with hackathon events that focus on data also known as datathons. In this paper we present our experience at hosting and running four datathons that involved students and members from the community coming together to solve challenging problems with data from not-for-profit social good organizations and publicly open data. Our reported experience from our datathons will help inform other academics and community groups who also wish to host datathons to help facilitate their students and members to learn key data science and analytics skills.

We explore the design of a wearable computing solution for first responders. Wearable devices have many uses, but commercial devices are not suitable for emergency response. First responders face high risk and volatile situations, and wearables possess significant potential to keep responders safe. A lack of understanding exists when designing wearables for first responders. Existing research focuses on the physical implementation of various sensors, rather than usability. Combining literature and extensive interviews, we devise design guidelines for responder-oriented wearable systems. We propose a prototype system, and discuss early feedback from responders.

The paper describes a toolkit that integrates spatially-aware multi-surface systems with mixed-reality approaches to create immersive collaborative environments. The toolkit integrates multiple digital displays and multiple Microsoft HoloLens devices with multiple Kinects. The HoloLens' allow several users to look at the same virtual hologram while the Kinects enable them to use body movements to interact with these holograms as well as with other digital surfaces in a space. Effectively, the toolkit enables its users to build collaborative applications that utilize digital displays as well as the space between them to interact with information. Our approach also facilitates the management of virtual objects and overcomes gesture restrictions of HoloLens. We use the toolkit in a prototype application for improving the efficiency and response time in emergency management.

Developing a usable Application Programming Interface (API) is a complex and expensive task. Two major factors play important roles on the usability of an API: the design and resources (e.g. documentation, tutorials). API Developers typically evaluate the usability of an API after implementation that results in refactoring tasks if an API lacks usability after development. This refactoring could be avoided if evaluation were continuously conducted while development. This paper explores a new combined process for building usable APIs that combines concepts from a usability evaluation method (Cognitive Dimensions Framework) and an Agile development methodology (eXtreme Programming). We explored the effectiveness of this combined process by implementing a web-based API and conducting a user study. The findings from our evaluation indicated that the new process helped in designing and building a usable API, but ignored some concerns related to resources.

RESTful API documentation is expensive to produce and maintain due to the lack of reusable tools and automated solutions. Most RESTful APIs are documented manually and the API developers are responsible for keeping the documentation up to date as the API evolves making the process both costly and error-prone. In this paper we introduce a novel technique using an HTTP proxy server that can be used to automatically generate RESTful API documentation and demonstrate SpyREST, an example implementation of the proposed technique. SpyREST uses a proxy to intercept example API calls and intelligently produces API documentation for RESTful Web APIs by processing the request and response data. Using the proposed HTTP proxy server based technique, RESTful API developers can significantly reduce the cost of producing and maintaining API documentation by replacing a large manual process with an automated process.

RESTful APIs are often manually documented. As a result, the process of maintaining the documentation of RESTful APIs is both expensive and error-prone. In this demonstration paper, we present SpyREST as an automated software as a service tool that can be used to document RESTful APIs. SpyREST leverages an HTTP Proxy server to intercept real API calls to automatically collect and generate RESTful API documentation by processing HTTP traffic involved in API calls. SpyREST provides an automated yet customizable example based documentation solution for RESTful APIs. RESTful API developers can use SpyREST to automatically generate and maintain updated API documentation.

When applications are integrated using web APIs, changes on a web API may break the dependent applications. This problem exists because old versions of the APIs may no longer be supported, a lack of adequate documentation to upgrade to a newer version, and insufficient communication of changes. In this paper we conducted a case study of evolving Web APIs to investigate what changes are made between versions and how the changes are documented and communicated to the API users. The findings are a list of recommendations for practitioners and researchers based on API change profiles, versioning, documentation and communication approaches that are observed in practice. This study will help inform developers of evolving Web APIs to make decision about versioning, documentation and communication methods.

Teaching group based Agile software development project courses is difficult. There are many aspects that need to be considered for a project to be successful such as a well defined scope, students working effectively together, and engaging with the customer. In this paper we present an experience report at teaching an Agile software development project course that involved teams developing web applications. The resources developed for the course and discussion about our experience will help inform others who also wish to teach group based software development courses.

Understanding information about software artifacts is key to successful Agile software development projects, however, sharing information about artifacts is difficult to achieve amongst team members. There are many information visualization techniques used to help address the difficulties of knowledge sharing, but it is not clear what is the most effective technique. This paper presents the results of a systematic mapping study of existing literature on information visualization techniques used by Agile software development teams. The results of the systematic mapping show that Agile teams use visualization techniques for designing, developing, communicating, and tracking progress. Our findings show that visualization techniques help Agile teams increase knowledge sharing and raise awareness about software artifacts amongst team members.

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.

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.

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.

Modern software development often involves the use of complex, reusable components called Application Programming Interfaces (APIs). Developers use APIs to complete tasks they could not otherwise accomplish in a reasonable time. These components are now vital to mainstream software development. But as APIs have become more important, understanding how to make them more usable is becoming a significant research question. To assess the current state of research in the field, we conducted a systematic mapping. A total of 28 papers were reviewed and categorized based on their research type and on the evaluation method employed by its authors. We extended the analysis of a subset of the papers we reviewed beyond the usual limits of a systematic map in order to more closely examine details of their evaluations - such as their structure and validity - and to summarize their recommendations. Based on these results, common problems in the field are discussed and future research directions are suggested.

Recently, there has been an interest in finding ways to combine reuse and customization as practiced in software product line engineering with concepts like iterative development and minimalism as preached by agile methods.This special issue presents cutting-edge research in the area of agile product line engineering.For the past few decades, the software community has put forward numerous efforts to lower the cost of software development, shorten the time-to-market of software products, and improve quality.Software product line engineering is one paradigm that aims to achieve these goals by means of systematic reuse and customization.In a software product line, similar software systems in a given domain are built using a library of core assets (typically developed in a phase called domain engineering).These assets can then be tailored to satisfy customer-specific needs (typically in a phase called application engineering).Another popular approach to achieve rapid delivery of software with minimal overhead is agile software development.Agile development promotes fast delivery of working software over a series of iterations, and it preaches concepts of simplicity and minimalism to cut waste (e.g.lengthy documentation, extensive modeling, and process definitions).Recently, there has been an interest in finding synergies between software product line engineering and agile software development in order to amplify production capabilities even further.This special issue presents the recent research in this direction.For this special issue, a call for papers was announced during the second XP workshop on agile product line engineering.The workshop was co-located with the 11th International Conference on Agile Software Development (XP2010) in Norway.Six submissions were received.For each submission, reviews were solicited from at least two independent reviewers.After two rounds of reviews, four articles were selected to be included in this issue.Two of the articles describe case studies conducted in software companies, while the other two are systematic reviews with different foci.The article by Jan Bosch and Petra M. Bosch-Sijtsema 'Introducing agile customer-centered development in a legacy software product line' discusses software product lines and agile methods in light of the issues associated with large-scale software development such as high coordination overhead, slow release cycles, and increasing error density.The authors present a case study of a Fortune 1000 company that delivers mostly finance and accounting software solutions.The company owns a product line that is the market leader in its domain in the U.S. with a market share of around 75%.In the article, the authors report on 14 semi-structured interviews that were conducted in the company to collect data on the challenges the company had faced with their original product line approach.The interviews covered discussions on the old and the new processes and the change towards the new process.The interviews along with other collected data were systematically coded, labeled and categorized over a number of iterations.The data revealed four main challenges, namely: the lack of customer feedback, heavyweight processes, inefficient utilization of resources, and low engagement of team members.The authors proposed a new approach to address these challenges.The approach used elements from design thinking, agile software development, and self-organizing teams.The results of adopting the new approach demonstrated improved customer involvement throughout the development process, reduced process overhead through the transition from component teams to feature teams, more efficient use of resources by enabling personnel to work in parallel, and increased team autonomy and motivation.Geir K. Hanssen's article 'Agile Software Product Line Engineering: Enabling Factors' reports the results of an extensive industrial case study to identify and understand enabling factors

Skill level and productivity varies substantially between developers. In current staffing practices, however, developers are largely treated as the same. In this paper, an empirical analysis of the tow formulations of assignment of developers to tasks and bug fixing activities is studied. Two related problems are considered:

Participation from all stakeholders is important in a successful software development project, especially if the development project is complex and has many stakeholders. Identifying the key stakeholders is very difficult in a large community-based open source development project, because a lot of conflicting ideas exist in the community and not all of the necessary stakeholders are represented in the discussions. We analyzed the homogeneity of the stakeholders in the story-test driven development tool community and the diversity of the opinions represented by the stakeholders. We gathered opinions from the agile software engineering community on a list of desired features in a story testing tool. Then we categorize the community using a social network analysis to analyze the consensus building process. The network analysis reveals that the community has several key people with dominant degree centrality in the social network and the tool development community is remarkably homogeneous. Our research shows that a social network analysis is a good way to analyze the characteristics of consensus reached during a product visioning process.

This study aims to find out if API unit tests can provide good usage examples, and if so, what prevents developers from finding and using those examples. The results of an experiment we performed with two groups of developers showed that unit tests can be very helpful, especially when the task is complicated and involves multiple classes and methods. Well-written tests proved to be a good source of examples, but finding the relevant examples using the standard tools might be very difficult. We propose to supplement the standard API documentation with relevant examples taken from the unit tests. To further improve the learnability of the API, presentation of the documentation and examples has to be tailored in a way that separates or hides advanced usage scenarios from the commonly used ones.

It is increasingly common for software and hardware systems to support touch-based interaction. While the technology to support this interaction is still evolving, common protocols for providing consistent communication between hardware and software are available. However, this is not true for gesture recognition -- the act of translating a series of strokes or touches into a system-recognizable event. Developers often end up writing code for this process from scratch due to the lack of higher-level frameworks for defining new gestures. Gesture recognition can contain a significant amount of work since it often involves complex, platform-specific algorithms. We present a domain-specific language that significantly simplifies the process of defining new gestures and allows them to be used across multiple hardware platforms.

Measurement and detection of redundancy in test suites attempt to achieve test minimization which in turn can help reduce test maintenance costs, and to also ensure the integrity of test cases. Test suite reduction based on coverage information has been discussed in many previous works. However, the applications of such techniques on real test suites and realistic measurements of redundancy have not yet been experimented thoroughly. To address such a need, we formulate in this paper two experimental metrics for coverage-based measurement of test redundancy in the context of JUnit test suites. We then evaluate the approach by measuring the redundancy of four real Java projects. The automated measures are compared with manual redundancy decisions (performed through an inspection by a tester). The results and lessons learned are interesting and somewhat surprising in that besides they show usefulness of coverage information, they present a set of shortcomings (in terms of precision) for the simplistic coverage-based redundancy measurement approach as discussed in the literature. The root-cause analysis of our observations identify several key lessons learned which should help the testing researchers and practitioners in devising better techniques for more precise measurement of test redundancy.

Following the agile philosophy that all core features of a system need an automated test harness, performance requirements also need such a check when they are essential for the success of a project. The purpose of this paper is to describe a tool, J3DPerfUnit, which supports automated performance testing for Java3D applications in agile environments. We elicited tool requirements from domain experts through a survey and evaluated J3DPerfUnit using code from our partner's bioinformatics project and Java3D official tutorials. The evaluation pointed out that the tool is effective in detecting performance problems and in identifying where they come from when loading/unloading a 3D object.

In this paper, we describe BuildBot, a robotic interface developed to assist with the continuous integration process utilized by co-located agile software development teams. BuildBot's physical nature allows us to engage the agile software development team members through vision, hearing and touch. In this way, BuildBot becomes an active part of the development process by bringing together human-robot interaction, human group dynamics and software engineering concepts through a number of interaction modalities. In this paper we describe the design and implementation of the BuildBot prototype, a robotic interface that can sense virtual stimuli, in this case the state of a software build, and react accordingly in a physical way via vision, sound and touch. We present an early evaluation comparing BuildBot to two other tools used by an agile team to monitor the continuous integration process. We also show preliminary results indicating that BuildBot may be more noticeable to the developers and contribute to a fun and lighthearted atmosphere. We argue that by increasing awareness of the state of the software build, BuildBot can assist in the self-supervision of agile software engineering teams and can help the team achieve its goals in a more engaging and sociable manner.

Supporting agile teams from afar as they plan projects is a challenge. In this paper, we present a planning tool, MasePlanner, which supports agile teams as they collaborate in a distributed environment during their planning meetings. Combined with an audio link, our tool supports natural interaction similar to those found in collocated agile planning environments. MasePlanner supports planning in both vertical and horizontal tabletop workspaces by allowing participants to use interaction techniques such as moving and piling of story cards. By implementing a strong index-card metaphor, the tool aims to be more closely aligned with natural environments

A fleet of emerging agile methods of software development (with eXtreme Programming and Scrum being the most broadly used) is both gaining popularity and generating lots of controversy. This high-level tutorial gives an overview of agile methods and provides background to understand how agile teams are trying to address modern software development challenges. Analysis of initial empirical evidence is used to discuss strengths and limitations of agile methods in various contexts. The participants are introduced to the innovation diffusion models and environments, and discuss what is needed for agile methods to cross the chasm and move into the mainstream of software development.

Critiques of the quantity and quality of empirical evaluations in software engineering have existed for quite some time. However such critiques are typically not empirically evaluated. This paper fills this gap by empirically analyzing papers published by ICSE, the prime research conference on Software Engineering. We present quantitative and qualitative results of a quasi-random experiment of empirical evaluations over the lifetime of the conference. Our quantitative results show the quantity of empirical evaluation has increased over 29 ICSE proceedings but we still have room to improve the soundness of empirical evaluations in ICSE proceedings. Our qualitative results point to specific areas of improvement in empirical evaluations.

No abstract available

A fleet of emerging agile methods is both gaining popularity and generating lots of controversy. Real-world examples argue for (e.g. Highsmith and Cockburn, 2001) and against (e.g. Rakitin, 2001) agile methods. Several leading software engineering experts suggest that synthesizing the two, agile with traditional, may provide developers with a comprehensive spectrum of methods (e.g. Boehm, 2002 and 2004 and Humphrey, 2005). This high-level overview tutorial provides background to understand how agile teams are trying to solve modern software development issues.

Research was conducted on using agile methods in software engineering education. This paper explores the perceptions of students from five different academic levels of agile practices. Information has been gathered through the collection of quantitative and qualitative data over three academic years, and analysis reveals student experiences, mainly positive but also some negative. Student opinions indicate the preference to continue to use agile practices at the workplace if allowed. A way these findings may potentially be extrapolated to the industrial settings is discussed. Finally, this report should encourage other academics considering adoption of agile methods in their computer science or software engineering curricula.

The poster presents an exploratory case study on the use of a Wiki-based experience repository (MASE) that utilizes both informal and formal knowledge representations. The results provide evidences for the need of knowledge sharing tools to incorporate not only codification-oriented repository technologies but also those that facilitate communication and collaboration among people, and to support not only structured but also unstructured knowledge representation. It reveals that an informal knowledge authoring tool such as MASE is used for sharing content for problem understanding, instrumental, projective, social, expertise location, and content navigation purposes. We also observe self-organized maintenance of the repository content among the ordinary repository users as a result of the open-edit nature of the Wiki-based repository.

Distributed software development support systems typically use a centralized client-server architecture. This approach has some drawbacks such as the participants may experience lengthy delays if they are located far from the central server, and the organization that runs the server must deal with the security and privacy issues that come with being in charge of a central repository of information. We are investigating whether this centralized control can be relaxed by using peer-to-peer (P2P) technology. We address the motivations for using a P2P architecture, examine the design issues related to the development of a P2P software development support system, and discuss the implementation framework, that will be used.

Agile practices are arguably improving the productivity of small, co-located software development teams. We describe an approach that tries to overcome the constraint of co-location by introducing a process-support environment (called MILOS) that helps software development teams to maintain adaptive practices in a distributed setting. MILOS supports project coordination, information routing, team communication, pair programming and experience management.

No abstract available.

No abstract available.

The MILOS system supports software development processes over the Internet.It integrates process modeling with project planning and enactment.Our flexible workflow engine allows refining and changing process models during project execution, The built-in traceability component supports change notifications and helps the project participants to ensure that the project plan as well as the state of the enactment engine reflect the "real world development process.Tool integration is accomplished by using the built-in capabilities of Web browsers.

Representations of activities dealing with the development or maintenance of software are called software process models. Process models allow for communication, reasoning, guidance, improvement, and automation. Two approaches for modeling processes and instantiating and managing the process models, namely CoMo-Kit and MVP-E, are combined to build a more powerful one. CoMo-Kit is based on AI/KE technology; it is a support tool system for general complex design processes, and was not been developed specifically with software development processes in mind. MVP-E is a process-sensitive software engineering environment for modeling and analyzing software development processes, and guides software developers. Additionally, it provides services to establish and run measurement programmes in software organizations. Because both approaches were developed independently from one another, major integration efforts had to be made to combine both their advantages. This article concentrates on the resulting language concepts, and their operationalization necessary for building automated process support.