Planning land use changes requires input from experts across several domains with diverse expertise. Currently available tools were not designed for analysing the required ecosystem services before and after land use changes, or for analysing tradeoffs. Our study is motivated by the need for better tools designed for expert analysts and location knowledgable stakeholders to analyse data relating to land use planning, such as ecosystem services data. The effectiveness of an immersive VR visualization system (Immersive ESS Visualizer) for analysing and visualizing ecosystem services data, is evaluated and compared to existing methods of analysis, paper maps and a 2D screen. Although VR presented some difficulties, the benefits of spatially arranging maps, inspecting fine details, navigation by zooming, and inspection of hillshades provided sufficient advantages to make VR an effective tool for ecosystem services analysis. Participants using Immersive ESS Visualizer arranged handheld maps into 3D layouts, which would not be possible with paper or on the 2D screen. Our research demonstrates that geospatial analysis can be supported by comparative visualization in VR.

Ecosystem services are benefits provided to humans by ecosystems through the natural processes and conditions which occur [7]. Interviews with land use scientists identified problems with currently available software applied to their ecosystem services analysis. A user centred design process is adopted and a visualization system, Immersive ESS Visualizer, is presented for visualizing data relating to ecosystem services analysis. Immersive ESS Visualizer is designed for both experts and non-experts and allows users to compare data visualized with multiple hand-manipulated maps. Users can glide over a landscape with data layers draped to analyse areas of interest. Immersive ESS Visualizer could augment a process for presenting ecosystem services analysis results.

We developed a mobile learning application grounded on Transactional Distance Theory. The aim is to engage learners and decrease their feelings of isolation and emptiness when learners and instructor are physically separated. This study was launched in an effort to understand our target learners and provide an indication towards the practicality, possibility, and appropriateness of such theory-based design. The application provides text, video, and recorded audio as media, and includes chat function, game-based learning, and electronic assignment. This paper explores the method and findings of a survey study targeted at first year Computer Engineering and Computer Science student learners at the Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. Our survey results indicated that the learners had a positive attitude towards mobile learning, and they had a lot of experience using the provided media and functions. The theoretical-design was deemed to be practically appropriate for our learners. However, more encouragement and promotions would be needed in order to increase the application’s usage and recognition. We performed statistical analysis on the results and clustered the responses to form a persona which will be used in the next stage of this application’s development process.

The advance of mobile technology has transformed our society and altered many facets of our daily lives. Furthermore, its use within the context of education are becoming more critical as more educational institutions deliver their courses through the use of mobile technology and engage with their students via distance learning tools. However, mobile learning applications only have a few design guidelines that are grounded in learning principle to ensure their effectiveness. We applied principles from the Transactional Distance Theory (TDT) to formulate design guidelines specifically for designing effective mobile learning applications for computer science students. To evaluate the appropriateness and effectiveness of these guidelines in a mobile learning context, we developed application prototypes that teach computer related topics based on these guidelines, which will then be evaluated for their effectiveness on student engagement.

Software-Defined Networking (SDN) is an emerging networking technology that has attracted intense interest from both the industry and research communities. Thus far, it is primarily applied to datacenters and research network environments. Despite meticulous effort in planning and equipment selection prior to deployment, there remain unknowns that can affect the network's performance after equipment has been deployed and is fully operational. Network administrators and planners would benefit from a tool that is able to monitor the load on various network entities and visualize this in real-time and, even better, predict likely performance changes arising from traffic variation; this allows them to make prompt decisions to prevent seemingly small hotspots from becoming major bottlenecks. In this paper, we present a network visualization and performance prediction tool that enables network planners to examine how their networks' performance will be affected as the traffic loads and network utilization changes. This is a first of its kind where performance prediction is based on queueing analytic models of the network configuration coupled with real-time measurements taken from the network devices.

Large codebases - in the order of millions of lines of code (MLOC) - are incredibly complex. Whether fixing a fault, or implementing a new feature, changes to such systems often have unanticipated effects, as it is impossible for a developer to maintain a complete understanding of the code in their head. This paper presents CodeSurveyor, a spatial visualization technique that aims to support code comprehension in large codebases by allowing developers to view large-scale software at all levels of abstraction. It uses a cartographic metaphor to produce an interactive map of a codebase where users can zoom from a view of a system's high-level architectural components, represented as continents, down to the individual source files and the entities they define, shown as countries and states, respectively. The layout of the produced code map incorporates system dependency data and sizes regions according to a userconfigurable metric (line count by default), to create distinctive shapes and positions that serve as strong visual landmarks and keep users oriented. We detail the CodeSurveyor algorithm, show it generates code maps of the Linux kernel (1.4 MLOC) in 1.5 minutes, and evaluate the intuitiveness of the metaphor to software developers and its utility in navigation tasks. Results show the effectiveness of the approach with developers of varying experience levels.

Most software development tools and applications are designed from a single-user perspective and are bound to the desktop and Integrated Development Environments (IDEs). These tools and applications make it hard for developers to analyse and interact with software artifacts collaboratively. We present SourceVisa multi-user collaborative software visualization application for use on large multi-touch tables. We describe the design and visualization features of SourceVis, present findings from a user study, and discuss the implications for building collaborative software visualization applications.

Self-organizing teams have been recognized and studied in various forms-as autonomous groups in socio-technical systems, enablers of organizational theories, agents of knowledge management, and as examples of complex-adaptive systems. Over the last decade, self-organizing teams have taken center stage in software engineering when they were incorporated as a hallmark of Agile methods. Despite the long and rich history of self-organizing teams and their recent popularity with Agile methods, there has been little research on the topic within software wngineering. Particularly, there is a dearth of research on how Agile teams organize themselves in practice. Through a Grounded Theory research involving 58 Agile practitioners from 23 software organizations in New Zealand and India over a period of four years, we identified informal, implicit, transient, and spontaneous roles that make Agile teams self-organizing. These roles-Mentor, Coordinator, Translator, Champion, Promoter, and Terminator-are focused toward providing initial guidance and encouraging continued adherence to Agile methods, effectively managing customer expectations and coordinating customer collaboration, securing and sustaining senior management support, and identifying and removing team members threatening the self-organizing ability of the team. Understanding these roles will help software development teams and their managers better comprehend and execute their roles and responsibilities as a self-organizing team.

Grounded Theory (GT) is gaining popularity as research method in Software Engineering; however, it is still not widely understood. We present some patterns based on the use of GT to study Software Engineering contexts including our own experiences of applying classic GT in an attempt to make it more accessible for Software Engineering researchers (aka 'geeks').

Agile teams are described as "self-organizing". How these teams actually organize themselves in practice, however, is not well understood. Through Grounded Theory research involving 24 Agile practitioners across 14 software organizations in New Zealand and India, we identified six informal roles that team members adopt in order to help their teams self-organize. These roles --- Mentor, Co-ordinator, Translator, Champion, Promoter, and Terminator --- help teams learn Agile practices, liaise with customers, maintain management support, and remove ineffective team members. Understanding these roles will help software teams become self-organizing, and should guide Agile coaches in working with Agile teams.

Evangelists for Agile methods strongly encourage all projects to follow every practice of their chosen method. Based on a Grounded Theory study involving 40 participants at 16 organizations, and corroborated by 4 independent case studies, we argue that development methods and practices must be adapted to fit their contexts. Understanding Agility in context will help development teams, their managers, and Agile coaches to adapt development processes to fit their projects' contexts.

Software visualization has always been expensive, special purpose, and hard to program. Most of the existing software visualization tools require too much time for end-user developers to learn and make effective use of. We are currently building a Web software visualization application that allows end-user to create, view, save, and share visualizations. In this abstract we introduce our software corpus visualization project and summarize our results thus far.