Abstract
Collecting product and process measures in software development projects, particularly in education and training environments, is important as a basis for assessing current performance and opportunities for improvement. However, analyzing the collected data manually is challenging because of the expertise required, the lack of benchmarks for comparison, the amount of data to analyze, and the time required to do the analysis. ProcessPAIR is a novel tool for automated performance analysis and improvement recommendation; based on a performance model calibrated from the performance data of many developers, it automatically identifies and ranks potential performance problems and root causes of individual developers. In education and training environments, it increases students' autonomy and reduces instructors' effort in grading and feedback. In this article, we present the results of a controlled experiment involving 61 software engineering master students, half of whom used ProcessPAIR in a Personal Software Process (PSP) performance analysis assignment, and the other half used a traditional PSP support tool (Process Dashboard) for performing the same assignment. The results show significant benefits in terms of students' satisfaction (average score of 4.78 in a 1-5 scale for ProcessPAIR users, against 3.81 for Process Dashboard users), quality of the analysis outcomes (average grades achieved of 88.1 in a 0-100 scale for ProcessPAIR users, against 82.5 for Process Dashboard users), and time required to do the analysis (average of 252 min for ProcessPAIR users, against 262 min for Process Dashboard users, but with much room for improvement).

Abstract
Cloud computing has emerged as the de facto approach for providing services over the Internet. Although having increased popularity, challenges arise in the management of such environments, especially when the cloud service providers are constantly evolving their services and technology stack in order to maintain position in a demanding market. This usually leads to a combination of different services, each one managed individually, not providing a big picture of the architecture. In essence, the end state will be too many resources under management in an overwhelming heterogeneous environment. An infrastructure that has considerable growth will not be able to avoid its increasing complexity. Thus, this papers introduces liveness as an attempt to increase the feedback-loop to the developer in the management of cloud architectures. This aims to ease the process of developing and integrating cloud-based systems, by giving the possibility to understand the system and manage it in an interactive and immersive experience, thus perceiving how the infrastructure reacts to change. This approach allows the real-time visualization of a cloud infrastructure composed of a set of Amazon Web Services resources, using visual city metaphors.

Abstract
Any software system that has a considerable growing number of features will suffer from essential complexity, which makes the understanding of the software artifacts increasingly costly and time-consuming. A common approach for reducing the software understanding complexity is to use software visualizations techniques. There are already several approaches for visualizing software, as well as for extracting the information needed for those visualizations. This paper presents a novel approach to tackle the software complexity, delving into the common approaches for extracting information about software artifacts and common software visualization metaphors, allowing users to dive into the software system in a live way using virtual reality (VR). Experiments were carried out in order to validate the correct extraction of metadata from the software artifact and the corresponding VR visualization. With this work, we intend to present a starting point towards a Live Software Development approach.

Abstract
Live Programming is an idea pioneered by programming environments from the earliest days of computing, such as those for Lisp and Smalltalk. One thing they had in common is liveness: an always accessible evaluation and nearly instantaneous feedback, usually focused on coding activities. In this paper, we argue for Live Software Development (LiveSD), bringing liveness to software development activities beyond coding, to make software easier to visualize, simpler to understand, and faster to evolve. Multiple challenges may vary with the activity and application domain. Research on this topic needs to consider the more important liveness gaps in software development, which representations and abstractions better support developers, and which tools are needed to support it. © 2019 Association for Computing Machinery.

Abstract
Virtual Reality (VR) has been recently gaining interest from researchers and companies, contributing to the development of the associated technologies that aim to transport its users to a virtual environment by the stimulation of their senses. Technologies such as Head-Mounted Displays (HMD), capable of presenting 360 degrees video in 3D, are becoming affordable and, consequently, more common among the average consumer, potentiating the creation of a market for VR experiences. The purpose of this study is to measure the influence of (a) video format (2D/monoscopic vs 3D/stereoscopic), (b) sound format (2D/stereo vs 3D/spatialized), and (c) gender on users' sense of presence and cybersickness, while experiencing a VR application using an HMD. Presence and cybersickness were measured using questionnaires as subjective measures. Portuguese versions of the Igroup Presence Questionnaire for presence and the Simulator Sickness Questionnaire for cybersickness were used. Results revealed no statistically significant differences between (a) VIDEO and (b) SOUND variables on both senses of presence and cybersickness. When paired with (a) VIDEO, the independent variable (c) Gender showed significant differences on almost all subscales of presence. Results suggest that the widely acknowledged differences in spatial ability between genders were a major factor contributing to this outcome.

Abstract
Conducting scientific experiments in driving simulators requires the modeling of reliable and complete road environments. These environments must provide extensive landscapes with the artifacts and natural element that can be usually found in the real world. This paper presents a method to efficiently produce models of natural vegetation. The produced models are then applied to populate existing terrain definitions, allowing the fast preparation of extensive environments with realistic landscapes. The human supervisor can interact in this generation process, in order to obtain custom landscapes definitions. After the landscape generation process, the road network definition can be then generated, producing a complete driving environment, in an integrated modeling process. The proposed method allows modeling a wide range of drive environments, with the realism and quality required to the realization of virtual training or experimental work in many terrain based activities, such driving simulators.