Animating the evolution of software

The use and development of open source software has increased significantly in the last decade. The high frequency of changes and releases across a distributed environment requires good project management tools in order to control the process adequately. However, even with these tools in place, the nature of the development and the fact that developers will often work on many other projects simultaneously, means that the developers are unlikely to have a clear picture of the current state of the project at any time. Furthermore, the poor documentation associated with many projects has a detrimental effect when encouraging new developers to contribute to the software. A typical version control repository contains a mine of information that is not always obvious and not easy to comprehend in its raw form. However, presenting this historical data in a suitable format by using software visualisation techniques allows the evolution of the software over a number of releases to be shown. This allows the changes that have been made to the software to be identified clearly, thus ensuring that the effect of those changes will also be emphasised. This then enables both managers and developers to gain a more detailed view of the current state of the project. The visualisation of evolving software introduces a number of new issues. This thesis investigates some of these issues in detail, and recommends a number of solutions in order to alleviate the problems that may otherwise arise. The solutions are then demonstrated in the definition of two new visualisations. These use historical data contained within version control repositories to show the evolution of the software at a number of levels of granularity. Additionally, animation is used as an integral part of both visualisations - not only to show the evolution by representing the progression of time, but also to highlight the changes that have occurred. Previously, the use of animation within software visualisation has been primarily restricted to small-scale, hand generated visualisations. However, this thesis shows the viability of using animation within software visualisation with automated visualisations on a large scale. In addition, evaluation of the visualisations has shown that they are suitable for showing the changes that have occurred in the software over a period of time, and subsequently how the software has evolved. These visualisations are therefore suitable for use by developers and managers involved with open source software. In addition, they also provide a basis for future research in evolutionary visualisations, software evolution and open source development

Adolescent Literacy and the Achievement Gap: What Do We Know and Where Do We Go From Here?

Reviews research and program initiatives focused on improving adolescent academic achievement by targeting literacy. Provides ideas for collaboration and coordination of funding efforts to improve the literacy achievement of under-performing adolescents

Training of Crisis Mappers and Map Production from Multi-sensor Data: Vernazza Case Study (Cinque Terre National Park, Italy)

This aim of paper is to presents the development of a multidisciplinary project carried out by the cooperation between Politecnico di Torino and ITHACA (Information Technology for Humanitarian Assistance, Cooperation and Action). The goal of the project was the training in geospatial data acquiring and processing for students attending Architecture and Engineering Courses, in order to start up a team of "volunteer mappers". Indeed, the project is aimed to document the environmental and built heritage subject to disaster; the purpose is to improve the capabilities of the actors involved in the activities connected in geospatial data collection, integration and sharing. The proposed area for testing the training activities is the Cinque Terre National Park, registered in the World Heritage List since 1997. The area was affected by flood on the 25th of October 2011. According to other international experiences, the group is expected to be active after emergencies in order to upgrade maps, using data acquired by typical geomatic methods and techniques such as terrestrial and aerial Lidar, close-range and aerial photogrammetry, topographic and GNSS instruments etc.; or by non conventional systems and instruments such us UAV, mobile mapping etc. The ultimate goal is to implement a WebGIS platform to share all the data collected with local authorities and the Civil Protectio

Improving Information Retrieval Bug Localisation Using Contextual Heuristics

Software developers working on unfamiliar systems are challenged to identify where and how high-level concepts are implemented in the source code prior to performing maintenance tasks. Bug localisation is a core program comprehension activity in software maintenance: given the observation of a bug, e.g. via a bug report, where is it located in the source code? Information retrieval (IR) approaches see the bug report as the query, and the source files as the documents to be retrieved, ranked by relevance. Current approaches rely on project history, in particular previously fixed bugs and versions of the source code. Existing IR techniques fall short of providing adequate solutions in finding all the source code files relevant for a bug. Without additional help, bug localisation can become a tedious, time- consuming and error-prone task. My research contributes a novel algorithm that, given a bug report and the application’s source files, uses a combination of lexical and structural information to suggest, in a ranked order, files that may have to be changed to resolve the reported bug without requiring past code and similar reports. I study eight applications for which I had access to the user guide, the source code, and some bug reports. I compare the relative importance and the occurrence of the domain concepts in the project artefacts and measure the effectiveness of using only concept key words to locate files relevant for a bug compared to using all the words of a bug report. Measuring my approach against six others, using their five metrics and eight projects, I position an effected file in the top-1, top-5 and top-10 ranks on average for 44%, 69% and 76% of the bug reports respectively. This is an improvement of 23%, 16% and 11% respectively over the best performing current state-of-the-art tool. Finally, I evaluate my algorithm with a range of industrial applications in user studies, and found that it is superior to simple string search, as often performed by developers. These results show the applicability of my approach to software projects without history and offers a simpler light-weight solution