Maleku: an evolutionary visual software analytics tool for providing insights into software evolution

Software maintenance is a complex process that requires the understanding and comprehension of software project details. It involves the understanding of the evolution of the software project, hundreds of software components and the relationships among software items in the form of inheritance, interface implementation, coupling and cohesion. Consequently, the aim of evolutionary visual software analytics is to support software project managers and developers during software maintenance. It takes into account the mining of evolutionary data, the subsequent analysis of the results produced by the mining process for producing evolution facts, the use of visualizations supported by interaction techniques and the active participation of users. Hence, this paper proposes an evolutionary visual software analytics tool for the exploration and comparison of project structural, interface implementation and class hierarchy data, and the correlation of structural data with metrics, as well as socio-technical relationships. Its main contribution is a tool that automatically retrieves evolutionary software facts and represent them using a scalable visualization design

The Fun of Exploration: How to Access a Non-Standard Language Corpus Visually

Historical dictionaries and non-standard language corpora can greatly benefit from a visual access in order to grasp the inherent tangled and complex nature of the knowledge encapsulated in them. Although visual analytics has been used to tackle a number of language and document related problems, most dictionaries are still reproducing the book metaphor in which Web pages substitute the paper and the user experience is only enhanced by means of hyperlinks. Although fields such as dialectology and dialectal lexicography have incorporated Geographic Information Systems and advanced computational linguistics features, spatio-temporal dynamics can be discovered or understood if appropriate visual analytics techniques are used to surpass the idea of these linguistic resources as alphabetically ordered lists. In this paper we present the work carried out in this direction for the Dictionary of Bavarian Dialects in Austria. By means of multiple-linked views an access that fosters the exploratory analysis of the data is enabled

Documentación audiovisual del diseño de interacción: trabajo con prototipos

Memoria ID-313. Ayudas de la Universidad de Salamanca para la innovación docente, curso 2013-2014

BicOverlapper: a tool for bicluster visualization

BicOverlapper is a tool to visualize biclusters from gene-expression matrices in a way that helps to compare biclustering methods, to unravel trends and to highlight relevant genes and conditions. A visual approach can complement biological and statistical analysis and reduce the time spent by specialists interpreting the results of biclustering algorithms. The technique is based on a force-directed graph where biclusters are represented as flexible overlapped groups of genes and conditions. AVAILABILITY: The BicOverlapper software and supplementary material are available at http://vis.usal.es/bicoverlappe

Addressing Fine-Grained Variability in User-Centered Software Product Lines: A Case Study on Dashboards

Software product lines provide a theoretical framework to generate and customize products by studying the target domain and by capturing the commonalities among the potential products of the family. This domain knowledge is subsequently used to implement a series of configurable core assets that will be systematically reused to obtain products with different features to match particular user requirements. Some kind of interactive systems, like dashboards, require special attention as their features are very fine-grained. Having the capacity of configuring a dashboard product to match particular user requirements can improve the utility of these products by providing the support to users to reach useful insights, in addition to a decrease in the development time and an increase in maintainability. Several techniques for implementing features and variability points in the context of SPLs are available, and it is important to choose the right one to exploit the SPL paradigm benefits to the maximum. This work addresses the materialization of fine-grained variability in SPL through code templates and macros, framed in the particular domain of dashboards

Towards a Technological Ecosystem to Provide Information Dashboards as a Service: A Dynamic Proposal for Supplying Dashboards Adapted to Specific Scenarios

[EN]Data are crucial to improve decision-making and obtain greater benefits in any type of activity. However, the large amount of information generated by new technologies has made data analysis and knowledge generation a complex task. Numerous tools have emerged to facilitate this generation of knowledge, such as dashboards. Although dashboards are useful tools, their effectiveness can be affected by poor design or by not taking into account the context in which they are placed. Therefore, it is necessary to design and create custom dashboards according to the audience and data domain. This paper presents an application of the software product line paradigm and the integration of this approach into a web service to allow users to request source code for customized information dashboards. The main goal is to introduce the idea of creating a holistic ecosystem of different services to craft and integrate information visualizations in a variety of contexts. One of the contexts that can be especially favored by this approach is the educational context, where learning analytics, data analysis of student performance, and didactic tools are becoming very relevant. Three different use cases of this approach are presented to illustrate the benefits of the developed generative service

Taking advantage of the software product line paradigm to generate customized user interfaces for decision-making processes: a case study on university employability

[EN]University employment and, specifically, employability has gained relevance since research in these fields can lead to improvement in the quality of life of individual citizens. However, empirical research is still insufficient to make significant decisions, and relying on powerful tools to explore data and reach insights on these fields is paramount. Information dashboards play a key role in analyzing and visually exploring data about a specific topic or domain, but end users can present several necessities that differ from each other, regarding the displayed information itself, design features and even functionalities. By applying a domain engineering approach (within the software product line paradigm), it is possible to produce customized dashboards to fit into particular requirements, by the identification of commonalities and singularities of every product that could be part of the product line. Software product lines increase productivity, maintainability and traceability regarding the evolution of the requirements, among other benefits. To validate this approach, a case study of its application in the context of the Spanish Observatory for University Employability and Employment system has been developed, where users (Spanish universities and administrators) can control their own dashboards to reach insights about the employability of their graduates. These dashboards have been automatically generated through a domain specific language, which provides the syntax to specify the requirements of each user. The domain language fuels a template-based code generator, allowing the generation of the dashboards' source code. Applying domain engineering to the dashboards' domain improves the development and maintainability of these complex software products given the variety of requirements that users might have regarding their graphical interfaces

Beneficios de la aplicación del paradigma de líneas de productos software para generar dashboards en contextos educativos

Data are crucial to improve decision-making and to obtain greater benefits in any type of activity. However, the large amount of information generated by new technologies has made data analysis and knowledge generation a complex task.  Numerous tools have emerged to facilitate this knowledge generation, such as dashboards. Although dashboards are very powerful tools, their effectiveness can be affected by a bad design or by not taking into account the context in which they are placed. Therefore, it is necessary to design and create tailored dashboards according to the audience and data domain. Creating tailored dashboards can be very beneficial, but also a costly process in terms of time and resources. This paper presents an application of the software product line paradigm to generate dashboards adapted to any context in a more straightforward way by reusing both software components and knowledge. One of the contexts that can be especially favored by this approach is the educational context, where analítica del aprendizaje and the analysis of student performance to improve learning methodologies are becoming very popular. Having tailored dashboards for any role (student, teacher, administrator, etc.) can improve decision making processes by showing each user the information that interests them most in the way that best enables them to understand it.Los datos son cruciales para mejorar la toma de decisiones y obtener mayores beneficios en cualquier tipo de actividad. Sin embargo, la gran cantidad de información generada debido a las nuevas tecnologías ha convertido el análisis de los datos y la generación de conocimiento a partir de ellos en una tarea compleja. Numerosas herramientas han surgido para facilitar esta generación de conocimiento, como es el caso de los dashboards o paneles de información. Aunque los paneles de control sean herramientas muy potentes, su efectividad puede verse afectada por un mal diseño o por no tener en cuenta el contexto en el que se encuadran. Por ello, es necesario diseñar y crear paneles de control a medida en función de la audiencia y dominio de los datos. Crear paneles de control personalizados puede ser muy beneficioso, pero también un proceso costoso en lo que al tiempo y recursos se refiere. Este trabajo presenta una aplicación del paradigma de líneas de productos software para generar paneles de control adaptados a cualquier contexto de manera más sencilla, reutilizando tanto componentes software como conocimiento. Uno de los contextos que puede verse especialmente favorecido por este enfoque es el contexto educativo, donde la analítica del aprendizaje y el análisis de datos sobre el rendimiento de los estudiantes se está popularizando. Contar con paneles de control personalizables para cualquier rol (estudiante, profesor, administrador, etc.) puede mejorar los procesos de toma de decisiones, mostrando a cada usuario la información que más le interesa de la forma que mejor le permita comprenderla