Probes and Sensors: The Design of Feedback Loops for Usability Improvements

The importance of user-centric design methods in the design of programming tools is now well accepted. These methods depend on creating a feedback loop between the designers and their users, providing data about developers, their needs and behaviour gathered through various means. These include controlled experiments, field observations, as well as analytical frameworks. However, whilst there have been a number of experiments detailed, quantitative data is rarely used as part of the design process. Part of the reason for this might be that such feedback loops are hard to design and use in practice. Still, we believe there is potential in this approach and opportunities in gathering this kind of ‘big data’. In this paper, we sketch a framework for reasoning about these feedback loops - when data gathering may make sense and for how to incorporate the results of such data gathering into the programming tool design process. We illustrate how to use the framework on two case studies and outline some of the challenges in instrumentation and in knowing when and how to act on signals

Retirement celebration for Rev. John Kucharik. Jan 24, 1982

Rev. John Kucharik, who had faithfully served St. Luke\u27s for almost 15 years after the death of the congregation\u27s first pastor in 1967, was honored by the congregation with a fellowship dinner served in Founders Hall following the two morning worship services on Sunday, January 24, 1982. The scripture chosen as the theme for the day was Philippians 4:4 ( Rejoice in the Lord always, and again I say, rejoice! ) because it exemplified Pastor Kucharik\u27s entire life of ministry. Flowers for the church altar were provided by the church and school staff; the homily was preached by SELC District President, Dr. Albert Marcis; Pastors Daniel Estok and Carl Toelke served as liturgists; Judy Duda served as organist and Ruth Wiedenmann directed the church choir for the worship services. Pastor Kucharik continued to serve as a Visiting Pastor for Trinity Lutheran Church in Orlando for several years after retiring from St. Luke\u27s and also ministered to Lutheran Haven residents as Chaplain

Vision 87 75th Anniversary Membership Directory. 1987

A commemorative St. Luke\u27s membership directory was published in 1987, in observance of the 75th Anniversary of the congregation that year. In addition to a brief history,recapturing some of the highlights of those 75 years, the directory contained a listing of congregational ministries and activities and photos of all the members at that time

Open Data-driven Usability Improvements of Static Code Analysis and its Challenges

Context: Software development is moving towards a place where data about development is gathered in a systematic fashion in order to improve the practice, for example, in tuning of static code analysis. However, this kind of data gathering has so far primarily happened within organizations, which is unfortunate as it tends to favor larger organizations with more resources for maintenance of developer tools. Objective: Over the years, we have seen a lot of benefits from open source and recently there has been a lot of development in open data. We see this as an opportunity for cross-organisation community building and wonder to what extent the views on using and sharing open source software developer tools carry across to open data-driven tuning of software development tools. Method: An exploratory study with 11 participants divided into 3 focus groups discussing using and sharing of static code analyzers and data about these analyzers. Results: While using and sharing open-source code (analyzers in this case) is perceived in a positive light as part of the practice of modern software development, sharing data is met with skepticism and uncertainty. Developers are concerned about threats to the company brand, exposure of intellectual property, legal liabilities, and to what extent data is context-specific to a certain organisation. Conclusions: Sharing data in software development is different from sharing data about software development. We need to better understand how we can provide solutions for sharing of software development data in a fashion that reduces risk and enables openness

Nigerian Newspaper Coverage of Climate Change, 2009-2010

This paper assessed the reportage of climate change in selected Nigerian newspapers, namely The Guardian, Daily Sun, ThisDay, and Vanguard. This work was done to situate Nigerian newspaper reportage of climate change within the domain of global discourses on climate change. Results indicated that the newspapers gave significant attention to issues on climate change. News stories constituted 55% of stories analysed; non news, 45%. The newspapers portrayed climate change as human-induced. Thus, stories fuelling uncertainty about climate change were not visible in the newspapers. The newspapers portrayed the Nigerian public as believing in the truth of climate change but inaccurately linked it to changes in weather patterns. Nigeria was reported as dependent on foreign aid to fight climate change. This study recommended that Nigerian newspapers should use lots of non-news stories in reporting climate change to enable them handle more analysis needed to portray the important issues in climate change solutions. Key words: Climate change, climate scepticism, emission cuts, anti-emission solutions, pro-emission solutions, portrayals, framing, climate talk

Evaluating programming systems design

Research on programming systems design needs to consider a wide range of aspects in their full complexity. This includes user interaction, implementation, interoperability but also the sustainability of its ecosystem and wider societal impact. Established methods of evaluation, such as formal proofs or user studies, impose a reductionist view that makes it difficult to see programming systems in their full complexity and, consequently, force researchers to adopt simplistic perspectives. This paper asks whether we can create more amenable methods of evaluation derived from existing informal practices such as multimedia essays, demos, and interactive tutorials. These popular forms incorporate recorded or scaffolded interaction, often embedded in a text that guides the reader. Can we augment such forms with structure and guidelines to obtain methods of evaluation suitable for peer review? We do not answer this question, but merely seek to identify some of the problems and instigate a community discussion. In that spirit we propose to hold a panel session at the conference

What’s bothering developers in code review?

The practice of code review is widely adopted in industry and hasbeen studied to an increasing degree in the research community.However, the developer experience of code review has receivedlimited attention. Here, we report on initial results from a mixed-method exploratory study of the developer experience

GANDER: a Platform for Exploration of Gaze-driven Assistance in Code Review

Gaze-control and gaze-assistance in software development tools have so far been explored in the setting of code editing, but other developer activities like code review could also benefit from this kind of tool support.In this paper, we present GANDER, a platform for user studies on gaze-assisted code review. As a proof of concept, we extend the platform with an assistant that highlights name relationships in the code under review based on gaze behavior, and we perform a user study with 7 participants. While the participants experience the interaction as overwhelming and lacking explicit actions (seen in other similar user studies), the study demonstrates the platform's capability for mobility, real-time gaze interaction, data logging, replay and analysis