Icpc 2011 storey

SHriMP Views: The Untold Story Margaret-Anne Storey University of Victoria ICPC 2011 Award for Most Influential Paper from IWPC 2001. "An Interactive Visualization Environment for Exploring Java Programs" authored by Margaret-Anne Storey, Jeff Michaud and Casey Best.

The storyline
History of SHriMP Views
What inspired it
Lessons learned along the way (tools and studies)
How the tool and underlying theory evolved
Our follow-on work to SHriMP
Other visualizations that show promise for the near future
Some advice for researchers

Acknowledgements….
My students and former colleagues:
Hausi Muller
Kenny Wong
Casey Best
Jeff Michaud
Rob Lintern
Ian Bull
Chris Callendar
Del Myers
…
Funding:
NSERC
University of Victoria
IBM
Darpa
Stanford University
MIT
NASA
DRDC
Susan Sim, Filippo Ricci and other members of the committee for selecting this paper

10 years ago…..
Year 2000 bug was still fresh in our memories!
PCs around for 20 years
eCommerce was on the rise
Integration, migration, interoperability (legacy code)

Many visualization tools
Rigi , PECAN, Seesoft
Landscape views, Hy+
Surgeon’s Assistant
Bauhaus
… ..
… ..
… ..
Imagix 4D
Sotograph
Polymetric views

What about Fred Brooks???

Fred Brooks misquoted…
He claims software is inherently invisible and unvisualizable… not amenable to a geometric mapping… But are software code, designs, documentation, invisible?
His quote referred to PhDs on visual programming! Not to visualization of preexisting software artifacts….
No silver bullet: Essence and accidents of software engineering, 1987 IEEE Computer

Information visualization
People have used external aids for centuries to amplify cognition (e.g. paper, slide rule, diagrams, charts)
Visualize: to form a mental image or vision
The use of computer supported, interactive, visual representations of abstract data can amplify cognition
Visualizations can help us gain insight about data

Other trends…
Higraphs in software engineering [David Harel, 1988]
Pad++, a zoomable user interface [Bederson et al., 1994]
Continuous Zoom [Bartram et al., 1995]

SHriMP – A Software Exploration Tool
S imple H ierarchical M ulti- P erspective Views (for Rigi):
Make better use of limited screen area
Leveraging sophisticated animation and layout, fisheye view features
[ICSM 1995]

Lessons #1
Evaluated early version of SHriMP and compared it to Command Line and Rigi (multiple windows) [WCRE 1996]
“ Source code is king” (Janice Singer)
Search is an essential activity in program comprehension (Lethbridge, Singer)
Fisheye views not so useful!
Efficiency was a concern

Comprehension theories
Top-down comprehension model [Brooks, Soloway, Ehrlich, 1986]
Bottom-up comprehension [Shneiderman/Mayer 1979, Pennington 1987]
Opportunistic and systematic strategies [Littman et al. , Letovsky 1987]
Integrated meta-model [Vans, von Mayrhauser 1995]
Hypermedia navigation (coherence, legibility) [e.g. Thurston et al. ]

A Cognitive Framework for Describing and Evaluating Software Exploration Tools IWPC 1997, JSS Supporting program comprehension Bottom-up Top-down Integrated Navigation Orientation cues User interface Bottom-up Top-down Navigation Orientation cues User interface Cognitive Design Elements Enhance program comprehension Reduce cognitive overhead

Integrated Bottom-up Top-down Enhance program comprehension Provide directional navigation Orientation cues Navigation User interface Reduce cognitive overhead Cognitive Design Elements Support arbitrary navigation … bookmarks, search engines Indicate options for reaching new locations Display path to the focus Indicate the current focus … histories, overview windows, trails

SHriMP – A Software Exploration Tool
S imple H ierarchical M ulti- P erspective Views (for Rigi):
Make better use of limited screen area
Leveraging sophisticated animation and layout features
Integrate code browsing using hypertext (HTML objects) embedded in the graph
Using nested graphs (containment) and ZUIs
Support for top down and bottom up navigation
Integrated search, source code views

Almost 10 year old demo!

What tools do programmers need to understand programs? A Cognitive Framework of Design Elements to guide tool design Evaluate tool usefulness and usability with user studies SHriMP Views How do programmers understand programs?

Lessons #2
Compared SHriMP with Rigi and SNiFF++ [WCRE 1997]
Overviews in Rigi and SHriMP communicated a mental map
Opportunistic sightseeing behaviours observed in SHriMP
Need for better searching and filtering tools in SHriMP
Layouts not so important (but preserving mental map is)
Align with the tools developers use (reduce friction )
“ Star programmers ” can use any tool

Creole: Integration of SHriMP with Eclipse 2007 Demo …

Recap on noteworthy features
Filmstrip – semantic bookmarks (snapshots)
Scripting (javascript)
Customized views
On demand visualization

Beyond software visualization….
Ontologies in Protégé, Jambalaya (Darpa, Stanford University)
Version control information, Xia
Business flow diagrams, Ebi (IBM)
Assembly (DND)

Lessons learned #3
Need for on-demand task driven visualization as opposed to overviews…
Customization required but very few users will write scripts (unless it is easy to do so!)
Source code should be editable … Need to be able to play with the invisible stuff…
Executing the program is important (duh…)

Lessons learned about empirical studies
Need for an underlying theory ! Otherwise you only know one tool is better than another not why…
Not enough to say my users liked it or that they used it or that they answered questions they hadn’t actually thought of before they saw my tool!
Student programmers are *not* the same as prof devs
Statistical significance is not the holy grail (too many controls), strive to be convinced (but convincing reviewers is harder)
Understand the different tradeoffs of empirical studies and choose wisely and purposefully [McGrath94, Easterbrook2007]

The next chapters?

NavTracks/VizTracks [ICSM2005]

Beyond Bookmarks: Waypoints

Waypoints and metadata
Used by geographical positioning systems ( GPS ) to save locations for future navigation
They can be entered explicitly by entering lat/long coordinates or during navigation
They have metadata

TagSEA [CHI2006, ICSM2007]
Can waypoint in code, outside code, docs, xml, breakpoints, url etc.
Tags used for indexing waypoints

Waypoints -> Tours [ICSE2007]
Notion of user-defined trails was also proposed by Vannevar Bush for Memex (Bush, 1945)
Use cases for source code tours: Code review, education, testing, debugging…

Dynamic Interactive Views For Reverse Engineering Uses Dynamic Analysis to Create Trace-Focused User Interfaces for IDEs

Diver:

Choosel open source framework for creating web -based visualization environments with multiple coordinated views Try out Choosel at: http://choosel-mashups.appspot.com

“ each software project is a
live performance”
www.jazz.net

“ each software project is a
live performance”

Other exciting research!
Many other specialized visualization, exploration tools… tools for analytics…
Software cartography (Adrian Kuhn et al.)
Software Canvas (Rob Deline et al.)
Code bubbles (Andrew Bragdon et al.)
Debugger Canvas
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3p9XUwIlhJg

Some advice… (1)
Eat your own cooking
You need to feel the pain that your tool helps resolve
You also need to feel the pain of using your own tool
But don’t assume that this will be enough! adoption is hard!

Some advice… (2)
Focus on continuous need for comprehension rather than just the software immigrant…
Nowadays easy to ask people for advice (e.g. StackOverFlow…)… Can’t visualize what you don’t have yet!

Some advice… (3)
Does your tool really answer difficult questions that developers really care about? How do you know? Theories or insights!

Theories are littering the landscape!
Cognitive dimensions (Green and Petre)
Cognitive framework of design elements (Storey)
Cognitive support (Walenstein)
Pacione’s software visualization task model
Ko’s theory of navigation
Sillito, Murphy, Robillard… theories on navigation and questions programmers ask
And more…
Look in other disciplines!

Comprehension theories
Top-down comprehension model [Brooks, Soloway, Ehrlich, 1986]
Bottom-up comprehension [Shneiderman/Mayer 1979, Pennington 1987]
Opportunistic and systematic strategies [Littman et al. , Letovsky 1987]
Integrated meta-model [Vans, von Mayrhauser 1995]

Some advice… (4)
Understand different research method limitations
Be informed
Write fewer but better papers !
Fake it ! “A Rational Research Process, How and Why to Fake it”

Concluding thought: Accident or essence?
Probably accidental…. Essential complexity may still remain but cognitive support can help us deal more effectively with that inherent complexity
Software visualization declining in popularity as a topic but not as a solution

Takeaways
Layouts not that important, but the mental map is
Need to integrate in the IDE with good support
Can’t visualize what you don’t have
Importance of theories, eating your own cooking
Consider different research methodologies
Cognitive support will never be out of fashion

Contact me
Email: [email_address]
Blog: http://margaretannestorey.wordpress.com/
Twitter: @margaretstorey, @web2se
Papers, tools: http://www.thechiselgroup.org

References (1)
David Harel. 1988. On visual formalisms. Commun. ACM 31, 5 (May 1988), 514-530. DOI=10.1145/42411.42414 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/42411.42414
Benjamin B. Bederson and James D. Hollan. 1994. Pad++: a zooming graphical interface for exploring alternate interface physics. In Proceedings of the 7th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology (UIST '94). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 17-26. DOI=10.1145/192426.192435 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/192426.192435
Lyn Bartram, Albert Ho, John Dill, and Frank Henigman. 1995. The continuous zoom: a constrained fisheye technique for viewing and navigating large information spaces. In Proceedings of the 8th annual ACM symposium on User interface and software technology (UIST '95). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 207-215. DOI=10.1145/215585.215977 http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/215585.215977

References (2)
Mental imagery in Program Design and Visual Programming, by M. Petre and A. Blackwell, http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~afb21/publications/IJHCS.html
Price et al’s principled taxonomy of software visualization: http://www.dgp.toronto.edu/people/RMB/papers/p20.pdf
Cognitive questions in software visualization: http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~afb21/publications/book-chapter.html
Research methods in the social Sciences, by J. McGrath, http://social.cs.uiuc.edu/class/cs598kgk/papers/methodology-mcgrath.pdf
Pacione, M.J., Roper, M., and Wood, M. A Novel Software Visualisation Model to Support Software Comprehension. In Proceedings of WCRE. 2004, 70-79.
Andrew Bragdon, et al.: Code bubbles: a working set-based interface for code understanding and maintenance. CHI 2010: 2503-2512

References (3)
A Cognitive Framework by Storey et al : http://www.cs.uvic.ca/~mstorey/papers/jss.pdf
Margaret-Anne Storey, Hausi A. Müller, "Manipulating and documenting software structures using SHriMP views", International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM '95) (ICSM), 1995
Rob Lintern, Jeff Michaud, Margaret-Anne Storey, Xiaomin Wu, "Plugging-in Visualization: Experiences Integrating a Visualization Tool with Eclipse", 2003 ACM symposium on Software visualization, 2003
Theories, Methods and Tools in Program Comprehension: Past, Present and Future, M.-A. Storey, IWPC 2005 (also SCP 2006)
Cognitive Support in Software Engineering Tools: A Distributed Cognition FrameworkA Walenstein – 2002.
S. Easterbrook, J. Singer, M.-A. Storey and D. Damian, Selecting Empirical Methods, http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~sme/papers/2007/SelectingEmpiricalMethods.pdf

References (4)
Margaret-Anne Storey, Li-Te Cheng, Peter C. Rigby, R. Ian Bull, "Shared Waypoints and Social Tagging to Support Collaboration in Software Development", CSCW 2006: ACM Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), 2006
Margaret-Anne Storey, Li-Te Cheng, Janice Singer, M. Muller, Del Myers, Jody Ryall, "How Programmers can Turn Comments into Waypoints for Code Navigation", International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM), 2007
Li-Te Cheng, Michael Desmond, Margaret-Anne Storey "Presentations by Programmers for Programmers", 29th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), 2007

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Icpc 2011 storey

by Margaret-Anne Storey on Jun 30, 2011

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