2nd Workshop on the Evaluation and Usability of Programming Languages and Tools (PLATEAU) in conjunction with SPLASH and Onward! 2010. Call For Papers (CFP), paper submission deadline 13 August 2010.

http://ecs.victoria.ac.nz/Events/PLATEAU/

Programming languages exist to enable programmers to develop software effectively. But how efficiently... programmers can write software depends on the usability of the languages and tools that they develop with. The aim of this workshop is to discuss methods, metrics and techniques for evaluating the usability of languages and language tools.

JamesNoble attended EuroPLoP and presented the paper on "How Much is Just Enough: Some Documentation Patterns on Agile Projects" by Rashina, James, and Stuart.

NicholasCameron, StephenNelson, and JamesNoble attended TOOLS 2010. Nic presented his paper on "Encoding Ownership Types in Java". Stephen presented his paper on "Understanding the Impact of Collection Contracts on Design".

NicholasCameron, StephenNelson, and JamesNoble attended ECOOP 2010. Nic had a paper at FTfJP on "Towards a Semantic Model for Java Wildcards". Stephen had a paper at the doctoral symposium on "Identifying and Implementing Relationships".

RashinaHoda presented her paper "Agile Undercover: When Customers Don't Collaborate" and poster "What Language Does Agile Speak?", and SivaDorairaj presented his paper "Understanding the Importance of Trust in Distributed Agile Projects: A Practical Perspective" at XP 2010 in Trondheim, Norway. AngelaMartin and JenniferFerreira, Elvis alumni also presented their papers too.

RashinaHoda presented her paper on Organizing Self-Organizing Teams. Rashina Hoda, James Noble, Stuart Marshall at ICSE 2010. Also see the InfoQ article about Organizing Self-organizing Teams.

DavidPearce and JamesNoble attended the Dagstuhl Seminar on Relationships, Objects, Roles, and Queries in Modern Programming Languages, 11-16 April 2010.

Members from Elvis helped organise the 8th New Zealand Computer Science Research Student Conference (NZCSRSC) 2010 from 12-15 April at the Kelburn Campus of Victoria University of Wellington.

Rustan Leino from Microsoft Research gave a seminar on The Dafny program verifier.

Robert O'Callahan from Mozilla gave a seminar on API Design for the Masses.

Rashina Hoda gave a seminar on Organizing Self-Organizing Agile Teams. .

Craig Anslow gave a PhD Proposal seminar on Multi-touch Table User Interfaces for Collaborative Visual Software Analytics.

Manual Alcino Cunha gave a seminar on An Algebraic Approach to Bidirectional Model Transformations.

Werner Heijstek gave a seminar on Software Design in Global Development.

Sven Hartmann gave a seminar on Chasing after Potential Secrets in Relational Databases.

Philippe Kruchten gave a seminar on Software Architecture Knowledge Management

MarkMoir gave a seminar on "Experience with and Potential of Hardware Transactional Memory".

I will briefly summarise our experience with the Hardware Transactional Memory (HTM) feature of Sun's multicore processor code named Rock. This experience has demonstrated significant potential in making it easier to construct concurrent data structures that are scalable, efficient, and correct, but also a number of limitations that prevent us from exploiting the full power of HTM. In the second half of the talk, I will focus on the potential of HTM by considering how it can be used to simplify various concurrent algorithms. The goal of this work has been to explore the assumptions needed about an HTM feature in order to exploit it in various contexts. We hope these observations will help guide designers of future HTM features.

Bio: Mark Moir is a Distinguished Engineer a Sun Microsystems, and is the Principal Investigator of the Scalable Synchronization Research Group at Sun Labs. Moir received the B.Sc. (Hons.) degree in Computer Science from Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand in 1988, and the Ph.D. degree in Computer Science from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA in 1996. From August 1996 until June 2000, he was an assistant professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Pittsburgh, after which he joined Sun Labs.

James Skene who is a post-doc with John Hosking at the University of Auckland gave a seminar on "Descript, a declarative, object-oriented modelling language".

Abstract

Software engineering, or the act of producing software, involves capturing decisions and domain knowledge in abstractions. Ultimately, the programs that we write are abstractions, or models, of their every possible execution. But, in the course of writing a program we may also develop other abstractions, such as domain models, class hierarchies, interfaces, domain-specific representations etc.

Ideally, once we have captured some knowledge in an abstraction, we would prefer to reuse that abstraction in other projects, rather than go to the effort of redeveloping it. But, it seems to be difficult to keep track of what artifacts mean over time, and to separate interesting abstractions from non-interesting, project specific ones.

In my talk I will discuss Descript, a language that I am developing with funding from the FRST. Descript is an attempt at a language that will allow software engineers to capture abstractions in such a way that their meaning is clear, retained over time, easy to extract, relatively untainted by quotidian detail, and at the same time still useful. It is object-oriented in the sense that it models objects and relationships in the real world. It is declarative in the sense that it has no primitives for modelling actions. Descript is intended to be useful for programming, modelling and metamodelling. It is also intended to address some perceived deficiencies in existing technologies in the model-driven engineering sphere, such as UML, MOF and OCL.

Elvis arranged for Philippe Kruchten to give a talk at the Wellington Java User Group (JUG) on "Software architecture and agile software development: a clash of two cultures?". February 2010.

Susan Eisenbach from Imperial College, London, England gave a seminar on "Concurrent Programming: Is there a silver bullet?". February 2010.

Elvis had their usual Christmas Party in 2009 at DavidPearce's house. It was a glorious sunny day. Many sausages, steaks, and salads were eaten, not to mention lots of wine and beer were consumed. Fun was had by all. Even Santa made a cameo appearance disguised as a cat, have a look at the photos.

RashinaHoda presented her research results at Bar Camp Agile (12th Dec 2009)

We have the following summer research students working with Software Engineering staff on some interesting projects: ShannonBay, HughDavenport, DavidKydd, ClareLenihan, VictoriaOzorio, NickVause, AlliWitheford, ConstantineDymnikov, HannesMehnert

RashinaHoda, SivaDorairaj, and CraigAnslow are helping organise NZCSRSC 2010. Please submit a paper. The submission deadline is 31 December 2009.

Haowei Ruan has begun his post-graduate diploma in computer science looking at applying visual analytics to software.

DavidPearce gave another talk this year at the Wellington Java User Group, on Java Puzzlers, 2 December 2009.

At the December Graduation Ceremony RaduMuschevici (MSc) and Jason Xie (PhD in AI) will be graduating, congratulations.

CraigAnslow presented the Wikipublisher: A Print on Demand Wiki paper at the WikiSym symposium co-located with OOPSLA and Onward in Orlando, Florida, USA. We also successfully organised our Onward workshop on Evaluation and Usability of Programming Languages and Tools (PLATEAU). We had a number of great papers with some interesting discussions.

Stephen Cheng from Innaworks will talk about the A to Z of building a compiler, focusing on everything but the program analysis and optimizations. Stephen will try to cover garbage collection, multi-threading, run-time-library architectural choices, platform specific optimizations, specialized tools developed in-house for building a compiler (such as for debugging run-time library, or profiling etc). He will also talk a little on how code analysis/code generation interact with some of the above topics. Details: Friday, 25th of September, 2009 at 11am in CO216.

ClareLenihan, HughDavenport, JayShepherd, GeoffreySpurr, NeilBecker, JoshuaLindsay, and JamesSullivan presented posters of their honours project to the department and then to industry in the Cotton Club. All the posters looked very impressive and it was a great event had by all. Well done everyone.

DavidPearce gave a talk at the Wellington Java User Group, On Eradicating the Dreaded NullPointerException, 16 September 2009.

Final CFP for submissions to our workshop on Visual Analytics in Software Engineering (VASE), deadline 14 September 2009.

Andrew Craik from the Parallelism Research Group at the Microsoft Queensland University of Technology e-Research Centre gave a school seminar on Using ownership to reason about inherent parallelism in object-oriented programs. Andrew stayed for a week and had meetings with various people here working on programming languages and ownership.

Colin Atkinson from University of Mannheim, Germany, gave a school seminar on Boosting Productivity through Search-Driven Reuse.

KeithCassell and CraigAnslow presented at the IEEE Central Region Post-graduate event. Keith won an honourable mention for his presentation on Using clustering to enhance the maintainability of OO classes.

KeithCassell gave his PhD proposal seminar on Using clustering to enhance the maintainability of OO classes.