CSAIL Event Calendar: Previous Series

Software Cartography

Speaker: Adrian Kuhn , University of British Columbia
Date: December 14 2011
Time: 2:00PM to 3:00PM
Location: Patil/Kiva Seminar Room (G449)
Host: Rob Miller, MIT CSAIL

Abstract:
Imagine software engineers could speak about source code as “up in the north”, “over in the west” or “down-under in the south”. Imagine that everybody involved with a software system had the same spatial and stable and shared mental model of the project. In this talk I present “Software Cartography” a new approach that supports code navigation & understanding through a spatial visualization. The map is always visible in the bottom-left of the IDE, just like the GPS navigation device in your car. For each development task, related information is displayed on the map. The consistent layout of codemaps helps to establish a stable mental model of software systems. Codemaps use the same visual language as cartographic visualizations found in an atlas. Different phenomena, ranging from population density to industry sectors, weather forecast, birth rate, or even flow of trade, all displayed and expressed using the same layout. Code maps provides the same rich visual language for software systems.

Bio:
Adrian Kuhn is a postdoc fellow at University of British Columbia, where he works with Gail Murphy. His main research interests are human-computer interaction in software engineering and programming languages (HCI, SE, PL). He has been working on development tools, mainly using data mining and information visualization, and on dynamic programming languages. He received a PhD in Computer Science from University of Bern in Switzerland, where he worked with Oscar Nierstrasz. His thesis investigated information needs of developers and introduced “Software Cartography,” a new approach that supports code navigation & understanding through a spatial visualization.

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