Abstract
Cloud computing has been playing a significant role in the provisioning of services over the Internet since its birth. However, developers still face several challenges limiting its full potential. The difficulties are mostly due to the large, ever-growing, and ever-changing catalog of services offered by cloud providers. As a consequence, developers must deal with different cloud services in their systems; each managed almost individually and continually growing in complexity. This heterogeneity may limit the view developers have over their system architectures and make the task of managing these resources more complex. This work explores the use of liveness as a way to shorten the feedback loop between developers and their systems in an interactive and immersive way, as they develop and integrate cloud-based systems. The designed approach allows real-time visualization of cloud infrastructures using a visual city metaphor. To assert the viability of this approach, the authors conceived a proof-of-concept and carried on experiments with developers to assess its feasibility.

Abstract
Successful software systems tend to grow considerably, ending up suffering from essential complexity, and very hard to understand as a whole. Software visualization techniques have been explored as one approach to ease software understanding. This work presents a novel approach and environment for software development that explores the use of liveness and virtual reality (VR) as a way to shorten the feedback loop between developers and their software systems in an interactive and immersive way. As a proof-of-concept, the authors developed a prototype that uses a visual city metaphor and allows developers to visit and dive into the system, in a live way. To assess the usability and viability of the approach, the authors carried on experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of the approach, and how to best support a live approach for software development.

Abstract

Abstract
With the increasing complexity of software systems, software developers would benefit from instant and continuous feedback about the system they are maintaining and evolving. Despite existing several solutions providing feedback and suggesting improvements, many tools require explicit invocations, leading developers to miss some improvement opportunities, such as important refactorings, due to the loss of their train of thought. Therefore, to address these limitations, we developed a Visual Studio Code plugin providing real-time feedback - - and also information about each commit made to the version control system. This tool is also capable of recommending two types of refactorings. To validate this approach, we did a preliminary controlled experiment using hypothesis-tests to check specific results. However, in this initial stage, we didn't have enough data to confirm our research questions, and we weren't able yet to confirm the main hypothesis. © 2020 Owner/Author.

Abstract

Abstract
Communication is crucial in agile contexts due to the need for collaboration and the number of different people involved, ranging from developers to users and business people. This communication should be effective to ensure everyone is on the same page; otherwise it can lead to undesired results such as misunderstanding and loss of productivity. As such, there is a need to ensure good communication in agile contexts. This paper presents a pattern language to tackle this issue, alongside with the patterns of a section of the language. The pattern language aims to provide a set of practices that help with recurrent problems and increase the effectiveness of communication. The patterns presented in this paper (Information Radiators, Co-Located Team, Open Space, Informal Communication Space and Cubes) address the issues related with the physical environment surrounding an agile team. © 2020 ACM.