INGI Seminar - Vivide: Interleaving of Modification and Use in Data-driven Tool Development by Marcel Taeumel HPI Deutschland

Many programmers use programming tools but hesitate to modify them to accommodate challenging scenarios—taking on the role of a tool builder seems too costly, maybe not even rewarding. We propose a new perspective on graphical tools and provide a framework to build and modify such tools with a focus on high quality, low effort, and perpetual adaptability. That is : (1) we propose a Smalltalk-based scripting language that reduces the amount of glue code for view-model specifications, and (2) we propose a GUI design language that promotes short feedback loops in a live environment such as Squeak/Morphic. We applied our framework to context-oriented programming, source code versioning, run-time state exploration, and also its own evolution. At the time of writing, we are investigating to which extent programmers do take advantage of our mechanism.

Screencast: Exploring Code Structure with Treemaps in Vivide: https://vimeo.com/142670997

Marcel Taeumel is PhD student at the Hasso-Plattner-Institute at the University of Potsdam. He is part of the Software-Architecture group led by Prof. Dr. Robert Hirschfeld . Since October 2011, Marcel has also been part of the HPI Research School  after getting is Master's degree in Software Engineering at the HPI. Since April 2014, he has been participating in the Design Thinking Research Program [4]. His research activities include the area of integrated tools for programmers, especially code-centric program comprehension. For this, direct manipulation concepts, dynamic analysis, and cooperation of distributed teams in agile processes play an important role. Additionally, he investigates modularity concepts with respect to critical software quality metrics such as extensibility and maintainability while reasoning about interdependencies between languages and tools.