Showing papers by "Carsten Görg published in 2010"

Understanding Exception Handling: Viewpoints of Novices and Experts

Abstract: Several recent studies indicate that many industrial applications exhibit poor quality in the design of exception-handling. To improve the quality of error-handling, we need to understand the problems and obstacles that developers face when designing and implementing exception-handling. In this paper, we present our research on understanding the viewpoint of developers-novices and experts-toward exception-handling. First, we conducted a study with novice developers in industry. The study results reveal that novices tend to ignore exceptions because of the complex nature of exception-handling. Then, we conducted a second study with experts in industry to understand their perspective on exception-handling. The study results show that, for experts, exception-handling is a crucial part in the development process. Experts also confirm the novices' approach of ignoring exception-handling and provide insights as to why novices do so. After analyzing the study data, we identified factors that influence experts' strategy selection process for handling exceptions and then built a model that represents a strategy selection process experts use to handle exceptions. Our model is based on interacting modules and fault scope. We conclude with some recommendations to help novices improve their understanding of exception-handling.

CodePad: interactive spaces for maintaining concentration in programming environments

Abstract: When software developers work with a program's source code, the structure of the source code often requires that they split their attention simultaneously across several documents and artifacts. Disruptions to programmers' concentration caused by overwhelmed capacity can then lead to programming errors and increases in the time to perform a task. We suggest the addition of peripheral interactive spaces to programming environments for supporting developers in maintaining their concentration. We introduce the novel concept of a CodePad, a peripheral, multi-touch enabled display that allows developers to engage with and manipulate multiple programming artifacts. We illustrate visualizations built for a CodePad that support multiple development scenarios and we describe how developers can coordinate the interaction and communication between a CodePad and a programming environment in personal and collaborative tasks. Additionally, we propose a design space for other visualization tools and detail our initial prototype

Visualization and language processing for supporting analysis across the biomedical literature

Abstract: Finding relevant publications in the large and rapidly growing body of biomedical literature is challenging Search queries on PubMed often return thousands of publications and it can be a tedious task to filter out irrelevant publications and choose a manageable set to read We have developed a visual analytics system, named Bio-Jigsaw, which acts like a visual index on a document collection and supports biologists in investigating and understanding connections between biological entities We apply natural language processing techniques to identify biological entities such as genes and pathways and visualize connections among them via multiple representations Connections are based on co-occurrence in abstracts and also are drawn from ontologies or annotations in digital libraries We demonstrate how Bio-Jigsaw can be used to analyze a PubMed search query on a gene related to breast cancer resulting in over 1500 primary papers

Detecting user-visible failures in AJAX web applications by analyzing users' interaction behaviors

Abstract: Web applications can suffer from poor reliability, and AJAX technology makes Web sites even more error-prone. Failures of a Web application, particularly user-visible failures, impact users' satisfaction and may drive users away from using the Web site. Conventional testing techniques are inadequate for improving AJAX applications' reliability, and application providers commonly rely on fast failure detection, which is challenging. In this paper, we present a novel technique for automatically detecting user-visible failures in AJAX applications. Our technique trains a Bayesian model to analyze users' interaction behaviors to infer whether such user responses are related to user-visible failures. We implemented our technique in a tool called SIRANA. We performed a case study using a commercial AJAX application with seeded bugs, and collected users' interaction data during 14 one-hour sessions. We evaluated our technique using SIRANA applied to the collected data. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of our technique: It not only detected all seeded bugs, but also detected four real, previously-unknown bugs.

Data ingestion and evidence marshalling in Jigsaw VAST 2010 Mini Challenge 1 award: Good support for data ingest

Abstract: This article describes the sense-making process we applied to solve the VAST 2010 Mini Challenge 1 using the visual analytics system Jigsaw. We focus on Jigsaw's data ingest and evidence marshalling features and discuss how they are beneficial for a holistic sense-making experience.

Automated Bug Neighborhood Analysis for Identifying Incomplete Bug Fixes

Abstract: Although many static-analysis techniques have been developed for automatically detecting bugs, such as null dereferences, fewer automated approaches have been presented for analyzing whether and how such bugs are fixed. Attempted bug fixes may be incomplete in that a related manifestation of the bug remains unfixed. In this paper, we characterize the “completeness” of attempted bug fixes that involve the flow of invalid values from one program point to another, such as null dereferences, in Java programs. Our characterization is based on the definition of a bug neighborhood, which is a scope of flows of invalid values. We present an automated analysis that, given two versions P and P' of a program, identifies the bugs in P that have been fixed in P', and classifies each fix as complete or incomplete. We implemented our technique for null-dereference bugs and conducted empirical studies using open-source projects. Our results indicate that, for the projects we studied, many bug fixes are not complete, and thus, may cause failures in subsequent executions of the program.

Combining Computational Analyses and Interactive Visualization to Enhance Information Retrieval

Abstract: Exploratory search and information-seeking support systems attempt to go beyond simple information retrieval and assist people with exploration, investigation, learning and understanding activities on document collections. In this work we integrate several computational text analysis techniques, including document summarization, document similarity, document clustering, and sentiment analysis, within the interactive visualization system Jigsaw in order to provide a flexible and powerful environment for people to examine sets of documents. Our focus is not on cutting edge algorithms for computational analysis but rather on the process of integrating automated analyses with interactive visualizations in a smooth and fluid manner. We illustrate this integration through an example scenario of a consumer examining a collections of car reviews in order to learn more about the car and understand its strengths and weaknesses.

GeneTracer: Gene sequence analysis of disease mutations VAST 2010 mini challenge 3 award: Excellent process explanation

Abstract: Our visual analytics tool GeneTracer, developed for the VAST 2010 genetic sequence mini challenge, visualizes gene sequences of current outbreaks and native sequences along with disease characteristics. We successfully used GeneTracer in combination with data mining techniques to solve the challenge.

Proceedings of the 5th international symposium on Software visualization

Abstract: Welcome to SOFTVIS 2010, the 5th ACM Symposium on Software Visualization. This symposium focuses specifically on visualization techniques that draw on aspects of software maintenance, software evolution, program comprehension, reverse engineering, and reengineering. The high-level research question is "How can visualization help software engineers to efficiently and effectively develop and maintain large-scale, complex software systems?" We are very pleased to be part of VisWeek held from October 24th to 29th 2010 in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA. VisWeek is the premier forum for visualization advances for academia, government, and industry, and brings together the world's top researchers and practitioners with a shared interest in tools, techniques, and technology. VisWeek traditionally combines three main conferences: IEEE Visualization, IEEE Information Visualization, and IEEE Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST), along with a broad collection of workshops, tutorials, panels, demonstrations, posters, and exhibitions. We are proud that in addition to our traditional sponsorship from ACM SIGCHI, SIGGRAPH, SIGPLAN, and SIGSOFT, and our cooperation with ACM SIGCSE, we are this year also technically co-sponsored by the IEEE and the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Visualization & Graphics (VGTC). The co-location with VisWeek, involvement of both ACM and IEEE, and single registration model of VisWeek, will ensure a dynamic flow of participants and information between all events. We are confident that this setup will strengthen the interactions between software visualization and other related visualization areas. Traditional SOFTVIS attendees will have the chance to get in touch with the latest developments in information visualization and visual analytics. Information visualization and visual analytics researchers will get in touch with the latest advances and challenges in software visualization. We believe that our co-location will lead to new and promising cross-disciplinary developments, mutually beneficial for all researchers and practitioners who use visualization to analyze and understand large, complex, time-dependent datasets and problems. We are pleased to announce invited talks by two high-profile researchers at the crossroads of software engineering and software visualization: Arie van Deursen will deliver our keynote presentation and Grady Booch will deliver our capstone presentation. As part of VisWeek, we will share joint coffee breaks with the other events as well as joint poster presentations. We will also have a demo session in which live demonstrations of software visualization tools will be presented. This year there were 55 technical papers submitted. Technical papers were reviewed by at least three members of the international program committee. The program committee accepted twenty 10-page full papers, which yields a 36% acceptance rate. Additionally, we continued the poster and tool demo tracks established in previous editions of SOFTVIS. We accepted 9 posters and 3 tool demos for presentation as well as publication as two-page abstracts in the proceedings. As an innovation to the symposium, the chairs selected two papers from the highest rated papers, as determined by the reviewers, to receive an ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award: (1) An Interactive Ambient Visualization for Code Smells, by Emerson Murphy-Hill and Andrew P. Black; and (2) Off-Screen Visualization Techniques for Class Diagrams by Mathias Frisch and Raimund Dachselt. The Distinguished Paper awards recognize these papers as examples of excellent work that will stimulate further discussion and innovation in the field.