Live programming is an idea espoused by programming environments from the earliest days of computing, such as Lisp machines, Logo, Hypercard, and Smalltalk. In common with all these systems is liveness — a feedback nearly instantaneous and evaluation always accessible. In this talk, we will present undergoing research work aiming to bring liveness to more software development activities as a way to improve technical agility, so that software can be faster to write, visualize and understand, with the support of a few features of a Live Software Development Environment.

2. Ademar Aguiar
Software Engineering Research Group, FEUP
Liveness
a Trampoline to Ultimate Technical Agility
SGRio 2019 | 28 June 2019 | Rio de Janeiro, Brazil

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Ademar...

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Software Knowledge Management
patterns
wikis
agile

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continuously and iteratively
“Software Development”is all about“Knowledge Evolution”
Communicating and sharing
knowledge and experience
Formalising
information
Collaborating

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Software Development Lifecycle
Spiral [Boehm, 1986]Waterfall [Royce, 1970]

7. Agile: ASD, Crystal Clear, Scrum, XP…

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Agile is all about
tightening feedback loops!

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• test-driven development provides
developers with quicker feedback about
the correctness of the code that they are
writing
• continuous integration provides feedback
about integrability and integrity with that
of fellow team members
• continuous delivery allows quicker
product feedback from customers and
users, about fitness, back to developers
• information radiators allow teams to have
a quick feedback on the status of the
software development process as a whole
Tightening feedback loops, technical ones too!

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Software Developer as“Archer with Bow and Arrow”
[Christopher Hancock 2003]

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[Christopher Hancock 2003]
[Restivo 2019]
Software Developer as“Archer with Bow and Arrow”

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• External releases: from many months to continuum…
• Integration: from many weeks to continuum…
• Iterations: few weeks…
• Tasks: from days to hours…
• Programming episodes: from days to minutes
• Spikes|Explorations|Experiments: from days to seconds
Feedback loops: from months to minutes

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How to be even more agile?

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We are looking for even shorter feedback loops…
which new practices
and tools do we need?
to develop faster, better, and safer?
to reduce accidental complexity?

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Software Developer as“Waterer with a hose”
[Christopher Hancock 2003]
[Restivo 2019]

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Aims at providing real-time feedback to programmers, turning the traditional
three-phase edit-compile-run cycle into a continuum, accelerating the process
of finding the right solution.
Live Programming
aka Exploratory, Interactive, Dynamic, Prototyping…
[ElmLangHotswapping]

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What’s new and powerful?
[Restivo 2019]
inspection
exploration injection

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Feedback is nearly instantaneous and evaluation is always available.
“Liveness”
[Tanimoto 2013]
• Level 1. Informative: a model (can be code)
• Level 2. Significant: an executable model
• Level 3. Responsive: edit-triggered updates
• Level 4. Live: stream-triggered updates
• Level 5. Tactically Predictive: programming from
predictive behaviors
• Level 6. Strategically Predictive: inference of gross
functionality

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• Programming is just a part of the full software lifecycle.
• We believe that increasing liveness along all entire software
lifecycle would improve most — if not all — development
activities in a number of ways.
• We aim to extend this approach to more software development
activities.
What about liveness beyond Live Programming?

22. Ademar Aguiar , Hugo Sereno, Filipe Correia, André Restivo
Software Engineering Research Group, FEUP
Live Software Development

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• Live Software Development — LiveSD — strives to achieve
liveness in every activity, as much as possible and useful.
• It requires expertise on different areas related with software and its
engineering: Software Engineering (SE), Human-computer Interaction
(HCI), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and User Experience (UX).
• Key research question:
How much liveness will help on other activities of software
development?
• Expected benefits: immediacy, exploration, observability, control.
The Case for Live Software Development

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• abstracting the many elements of software development;
• enabling developers manipulating abstractions instead of the
artifacts that they represent;
• enabling the system to be constructed live — i.e., developers can
see the effects of their actions directly on a running system as those
actions are performed.
What do we need to have Live SD?

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• Liveness gaps
• A conceptual framework for LiveSD spanning key software development activities
and application domains to assess current level of liveness, identify relevant liveness
gaps, and outline ways to take them to the next levels.
• Representations
• Abstractions, models and human-centered metaphors that will improve the
developer experience and the transition between non-live to live software
development.
• Tools
• A Live Software Development Environment capable of providing multiple
perspectives over software systems, and targeting specific domains.
• Blending both existing and new features from visual editors, interactive technologies,
and several tools, such as debugging, refactoring, versioning, instrumentation,
experimentation, monitoring, and operations.
Research Focus

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2017-18
• Towards a Live Software Development Environment
• A Software Repository for Live Software Development
Environments
• Towards a Live Development of IoT systems
• Towards a Live Management of Cloud Infrastructures
• A Live Approach for Developing IoT Systems
2018-19
● Towards Live Refactoring of Software Systems
● Live web prototypes from hand-drawn mockups
● Live Automatic Bug Fixing
● Live Syntax-agnostic Collaboration
● A Live IDE for Deep Learning Architectures
● Two-way real-time integration of IoT devices in VPLs
● Live Software Architecture Refactoring
● Programming Language-Agnostic Live Playgrounds
Past and present

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Software systems as cities (Wettel et al.)
Metaphor“Software Systems as Cities”

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JUnit 4

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AMBIENTE VIRTUAL
_________
Towards a Live Software Development Environment

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JUnit 4
Composite:Component
Composite:Leaf
Composite:Composite

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Solution
How we intend to solve the problem

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Solution
How we intend to solve the problem

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“Supporting software development through live static metrics visualization”
Sara Couto, André Restivo, Ademar Aguiar
When developers have constant exposure
to software metrics, does that influence
the form and final results of their solutions?
Live Software Metrics

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“Live Web Prototypes from Hand-Drawn Mockups”
João Ferreira, André Restivo, Hugo Sereno Ferreira
Speeding up web development by reducing
the feedback loop between designers
and developers.
Live Web Prototypes

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“Tests as Specifications towards better Code Completion”
Diogo Campos, André Restivo, Hugo Sereno Ferreira
Shorten the development cycle by providing
the developer with relevant suggestions that
fixes not only syntactic errors but semantic
ones as well.
Automatic Program Repair

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“A Live IDE for Deep Learning Architectures”
Mário Gustavo, Hugo Sereno Ferreira, André Restivo
Speeding up deep learning development in
Keras using a Live Visual Programming
Language.
Keras Live Editor

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• Steven L. Tanimoto. Viva: A visual language for image processing. Journal of Visual Languages and Computing,
1(2):12, June 1990.
• Steven L. Tanimoto. A perspective on the evolution of live programming. Proceedings of the 1st International
Workshop on Live Programming, page 4, May 2013.
• Kenneth J. Goldman. Live software development with dynamic classes. Technical report, Department of Computer
Science and Engineering Washington University in St. Louis, August 2004.
• Richard Wettel. Software Systems as Cities. PhD thesis, Faculty of Informatics of the Universit`a della Svizzera
Italiana, September 2010.
• J. Vincur, P. Navrat and I. Polasek, VR City: Software Analysis in Virtual Reality Environment, 2017 IEEE International
Conference on Software Quality, Reliability and Security Companion (QRS-C), Prague, 2017, pp. 509-516.
• Ademar Aguiar, André Restivo, Filipe Figueiredo Correia, Hugo Sereno Ferreira, and João Pedro Dias. Live Software
Development: Tightening the feedback loops. Companion of the 3rd International Conference on Art, Science, and
Engineering of Programming, Programming 2019 Companion (To Appear).
• Diogo Amaral, Gil Domingues, João Pedro Dias, Hugo Sereno Ferreira, Ademar Aguiar, Rui Nóbrega. Live Software
Development Environment for Java using Virtual Reality. Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on
Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering 2019 (To Appear).
• Pedro Lourenço, João Pedro Dias, Ademar Aguiar, Hugo Sereno Ferreira. CloudCity: A Live Environment for the
Management of Cloud Infrastructures. Proceedings of the 14th International Conference on Evaluation of Novel
Approaches to Software Engineering 2019 (To Appear).
References

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So…

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• Many times we need to explore the solution space, to learn more
and faster, and the cycle edit-compile-run may not be enough.
• Live Programming proved to be useful: the liveness factor.
• Live Software Development — LiveSD — strives to achieve
liveness in every activity, as much as possible and useful.
• LiveSD blends expertise from different areas related with software
and its engineering: Software Engineering (SE), Human-computer
Interaction (HCI), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and User Experience (UX).
• We are looking for more cases and collaborations! Contact us!
Live Software Development

45. https://2020.programming-conference.org

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Muito obrigado!
ademar.aguiar@fe.up.pt
Software Engineering Research Group, FEUP