Visualization of Software and Development (slides - PDF)

Presenter: Paul Dourish, Faculty, UCI/ISR

Abstract: Software development is a complex and intricate procedure, and the challenges of maintaining a continual understanding of an evolving software product are considerable. Information visualization approaches provide some potential routes to managing this complexity. The essence of visualization is the creation of visual depictions of complex information spaces, to make patterns, anomalies, relations and comparisons visually salient -- turning cognitive tasks into perceptual tasks and exploiting our ability to directly perceive complex relationships. This supports a research agenda investigating how we can directly experience aspects of system behaviour and group activity that are otherwise hidden "behind the scenes." I'll present a couple of examples from recent work that illustrate the use of visual techniques for giving developers insight into the structure and behavior of their systems, and the collaborative activity of development teams.

Bio: Paul Dourish is Associate Professor of Information and Computer Science at UC Irvine; before joining the faculty at ICS, he was a Senior Member of the Research Staff at Xerox PARC, and has also held research positions at Apple Computer and at Rank Xerox EuroPARC. His primary research interests are in Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Human-Computer Interaction, with a focus on design approaches that blend novel interactive software design with theoretical understandings of social action. This has led him to investigate topics such as workflow systems, synchronous and asynchronous awareness, multimedia communication environments, architectures for collaborative and mobile systems, and attribute-based information stores. His current work focuses especially to the use of visualization techniques to provide end-users with visual experiences of complex processes, such as distributed system behavior, network security, and software dynamics. His book, "Where the Action Is: The Foundations of Embodied Interaction," was recently published by MIT Press.