Sensemaking Practices in the Everyday Work of AI/ML Software Engineering

This paper considers sensemaking as it relates to everyday software engineering (SE) work practices and draws on a multi-year ethnographic study of SE projects at a large, global technology company building digital services infused with artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) capabilities. Our findings highlight the breadth of sensemaking practices in AI/ML projects, noting developers' efforts to make sense of AI/ML environments (e.g., algorithms/methods and libraries), of AI/ML model ecosystems (e.g., pre-trained models and "upstream"models), and of business-AI relations (e.g., how the AI/ML service relates to the domain context and business problem at hand). This paper builds on recent scholarship drawing attention to the integral role of sensemaking in everyday SE practices by empirically investigating how and in what ways AI/ML projects present software teams with emergent sensemaking requirements and opportunities

Automatic Dialog Mask Generation for Device-Independent Web Applications

When building web applications for use on different devices, developers need to deal with a wide range of input/output capabilities that affect how users interact with the application: A dialog that can be completed in one step on a desktop client may have to be broken up into a number of steps on a small-screen mobile device. Since it is time-consuming to define all the possible dialog masks and dialog flow variants for different channels manually, it would be desirable to automate the adaptation of dialog masks and flows. To address this need, we introduce the DiaDef language for the abstract, device-independent definition of the widgets in a dialog, and the DiaGen framework that automatically breaks this abstract dialog definition down into sufficiently small dialog masks for the users’ mobile devices and incorporates them into suitable micro dialog flows that are generated at run-time in order to be handled by our Dialog Control Framework

A Notation and Framework for Dialog Flow Control in Web Applications

The usability of web applications today often suffers from the page-based medium’s lack of intrinsic support for hierarchical dialog sequences mirroring the parent-child relationships between dialog boxes in window-based user interfaces. For multi-channel applications, an additional challenge lies in reconciling the device-independent business logic with the device-specific interaction patterns necessitated by different clients’ input/output capabilities.We therefore present a graphical Dialog Flow Notation that allows the specification of nestable dialog sequences for different presentation channels. These specifications serve as input for a Dialog Control Framework that controls the dialog flows of complex web applications

Mobile Business Processes

Today’s global markets demand global processes. Increasingly, these processes are not only distributed, but also contain mobile aspects. We discuss two challenges brought about by these mobile business processes: Firstly, the need to specify the distribution of processes across several sites, and secondly, the need to specify the dialog flows of the applications implementing those processes on mobile devices. To remedy the first challenge, we give an overview of the Process Landscaping method with its support for refining processes across multiple abstraction layers and associating their activities and objects with distinguished locations. Next, we present a Dialog Flow Notation and Dialog Control Framework for the specification and management of complex hypertext-based dialog flows. These tools allow developers to build user interfaces for mobile client devices with different input/output capabilities, which all access the same application logic on a central server

Experiences with a dialog-driven process model for Web application development

We present a dialog-driven process model for the development of web-based applications that uses a graphical notation to model and iteratively refine the application’s dialog flow, and communicate with non-technical stakeholders in the development process. This way, the user interface can drive the design and implementation of the application logic and data model instead of being dictated by it. After an introduction of the underlying notation and dialog control framework, we present how these tools can support the phases of the development process and discuss experiences gained from the implementation of a web application that was built using this approach

Efficient Modeling of Hierarchical Dialog Flows for Multi-Channel Web Applications

In Web-based applications, most user interactions take the form of navigating between Web pages. The structure of the navigation model thus has a strong impact on a Web application's usability. However, specifying a user-friendly navigation model for complex applications can be time-consuming, especially when designing for multiple presentation channels. We therefore present the formal semantics of the dialog flow notation (DFN) that provides constructs for the design of modular navigation models, and especially focus on constructs that reduce the specification redundancy within and between channels, thus reducing the design effort for Web-based user interface

Executable Semantics of Recursively Nestable Dialog Flow Specifications for Web Applications

Information systems for the support of complex business processes are often equipped with web-based front-ends to allow convenient user access. To produce executable specifications of the users’ interactions with such web-based applications, we use a visual language that enables developers to model their complex dialog structures. In this paper, we introduce the formal semantics of the core constructs of this Dialog Flow Notation: We define its syntax in terms of invariants about the permitted elements and their relations, and show how any words of the language (i.e. any syntactically correct dialog flow specifications) can be mapped to a deterministic pushdown automaton whose behavior defines the notation’s semantics. This gives us and other tool developers a formal basis for the design and implementation of tools and frameworks that mirror the precise meaning of all DFN constructs

An Infrastructure for Retrieving Passengers’ Medical Records in Case of in-flight Emergencies

In this paper, we present the concept of a telematics system that not only opens an audiovisual communication channel to groundbased doctors, but also provides them with medical background information on the patient (e.g. contraindication of certain medicaments, affliction with haemophilia, diabetes). This information can be a vital supplement to the diagnostic data (e.g. electrocardiogram, oximetry) relayed to the specialist by the cabin crew, aiding the doctor in deciding on the right therapy, instructing the crew appropriately and monitoring the treatment

Concept of a System Providing Ground-Based Medical Support for In-Flight Emergencies

In this paper, we present the concept of a telematics system that not only opens an audiovisual communication channel to ground-based doctors, but also provides them with medical background information on the patient (e.g. contraindication of certain medicaments, affliction with haemophilia, diabetes). This information can be a vital supplement to the diagnostic data (e.g. electrocardiogram, oximetry) relayed to the specialist by the cabin crew, aiding the doctor in deciding on the right therapy, instructing the crew appropriately and monitoring the treatment

Fine-Grained Specification and Control of Data Flows in Web-based User Interfaces

When building process-intensive web applications, developers typically spend considerable effort on the exchange of specific data entities between specific web pages and operations under specific condi- tions, as called for by business requirements. Since the WWW infrastructure provides only very coarse data exchange mechanisms, we introduce a notation for the design of fine-grained conditional data flows between user interface components. These specifications can be interpreted by a data flow controller that automatically provides the data entities to the specified receivers at run-time, relieving developers of the need to implement user interface data flows manually