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

Steve Adolph a PhD student from UBC supervised by PhilippeKruchten on Agile Software Development visited Elvis on Friday 18 March, 2011.

Members of Elvis have two papers at the ACM Symposium on Software Visualization (SoftVis), Salt Lake City, UT, USA, 2010.

• User Evaluation of Polymetric Views Using a Large Visualization Wall. Craig Anslow, James Noble, Stuart Marshall, Ewan Tempero, and Robert Biddle.
• Exploring the Inventor's Paradox: Applying Jigsaw to Software Visualization. Haowei Ruan, Craig Anslow, Stuart Marshall, and James Noble.

Also see Highlights of SoftVis 2010

Agile Research Group hits the News: ACM TechNews Ministry of Science and Innovation and Victoria News

"Victoria scientists are combining their expertise with collaborators at universities around New Zealand to come up with faster, more flexible and more affordable ways of developing software. The research is part of a four-year project funded by the Ministry of Science and Innovation and has input from a range of industry partners.... James Noble, a professor of Computer Science at Victoria, says the traditional process for developing software dates back to the 1960s and has its roots in computerisation for the space race and weapons development...Victoria postdoctoral researcher Dr Rashina Hoda is investigating how teams should self-organise. She has studied 58 Agile practitioners from 23 software organisations in New Zealand, India and North America over the past four years to understand how they go about self-organising. She has used the information to develop a process others can follow...."

HuiMa and PetraMalik are on sabbatical from July-December 2011. Hui will be in China and Austria, and Petra in Germany and France.

At SPLASH 2010 members of Elvis have three research papers at OOPSLA:

• Agility in Context. Rashina Hoda, Philippe Kruchten, James Noble, Stuart Marshall.
• Tribal Ownership. Nicholas Cameron, James Noble, Tobias Wrigstad.
• Ownership and Immutability in Generic Java. Yoav Zibin, Alex Potanin, Paley Li, Mahmood Ali, Michael D. Ernst.

four workshop papers:

• Mojojojo --- More Ownership for Multiple Owners. Paley Li, Nicholas Cameron and James Noble
• GoHotDraw: Evaluating the Go Programming Language with Design Patterns. Frank Schmager, Nicholas Cameron, James Noble. Evaluation and Usability of Programming Languages and Tools (PLATEAU) Workshop
• Using Grounded Theory to Study the Humans Aspects of Software Engineering. Rashina Hoda, James Noble, Stuart Marshall. Human Aspects in Software Engineering (HAoSE) Workshop.
• Co-located Collaborative Software Visualization. Craig Anslow, Stuart Marshall, James Noble, and Robert Biddle. Human Aspects in Software Engineering (HAoSE) Workshop.

one workshop:

• Evaluation and Usability of Programming Languages and Tools (PLATEAU)

and one panel:

• Manifesto: a New Educational Programming Language. Kim B. Bruce, James Noble, Andrew Black, Jens Palsberg.

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.

Victoria University student brainpower is helping the Firefox web browser go faster. Victoria's School of Engineering and Computer Science has partnered with Mozilla Firefox's Auckland office to carry out research projects, including some which will help improve the performance of the world's second-most popular browser. The collaboration was forged by Dr Alex Potanin, Senior Lecturer in Software Engineering, and internationally regarded New Zealander RobertOCallahan who set up and runs Mozilla Firefox's New Zealand arm. The Auckland Mozilla office concentrates on hardware acceleration or improvements that allow browsers to quickly load big, graphic-rich websites. Recent graduate JanLarres, who came to Victoria from Germany to Complete his Master's degree, has conducted the latest project with his year-long research effort focused on accurate testing of the Firefox browser's speed. "Speed," says Dr Potanin, "is becoming one of the fundamental things that defines a browser. Google Chrome, for example, has a team dedicated to making its browser go as fast as possible." See the full story: Vic students help speed up Firefox web browsing

CraigAnslow presented his paper on "Multi-touch Table User Interfaces for Co-located Collaborative Software Visualization" in the Doctoral Symposium at the ACM International Conference on Interactive Tabletops and Surfaces (ITS), Saarbrucken, Germany, 2010.

PippinBarr was recently interviewed for the launch of his new book How To Play A Video Game by the Dominion Post in the news article Lecturer's dream job much more than just kids' stuff.

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

Communications of the ACM News featured an article based on an interview with Dr. Rashina Hoda where she provides 5 Tips for Agile Software Development

At ECOOP 2013 Elvis members had the following research papers:

• The Billion-Dollar Fix: Safe Modular Circular Initialisation with Placeholders and Placeholder Types.Marco Servetto, Julian Mackay, Alex Potanin, James Noble
• What Programmers do with Inheritance in Java? Ewan Tempero, Hong Yul Yang, James Noble.

and the following workshop papers:

• True small-step reduction for imperative Object Oriented languages. Marco Servetto, Lindsay Groves. (FTfJP)
• The Need for Capability Policies. Sophia Drossopoulou and James Noble (FTfJP)
• A Calculus for Constraint-Based Flow Typing. David Pearce (FTfJP)
• Graceful Dialects. Michael Homer (DSLDI)
• Modules as Gradually-Typed Objects. Michael Homer, James Noble, Kim Bruce and Andrew Black. (Dyla)
• Wyvern: A Simple, Typed, and Pure Object-Oriented Language. Ligia Nistor, Darya Kurilova, Stephanie Balzer, Benjamin Chung, Alex Potanin, Jonathan Aldrich (COOMPL)

DavidPearce was interviewed for VBC Radio recently about his Whiley Programming Language, listen to the interview. VBC is a student radio station run from Victoria University's Kelburn campus. In the interview, David talks about his 3-year research project on Whiley, a programming language he has developed, and the need to improve programming languages to make then more reliable and more resistant to hacking.

Bright Sparks, Dim Future? What's happened to our No 8 wire culture? Nikki MacDonald interviews some people (including PhD student Craig Anslow) and asks whether we're really the No 8 wire culture we think we are.

CraigAnslow was recently interviewed for the Victorious Alumni magazine which wrote an article about his PhD research on A Touch of Magic.

KeithCassell presented his paper on "Visualizing the Refactoring of Classes via Clustering", Keith Cassell, Craig Anslow, Lindsay Groves, Peter Andreae, and Stuart Marshall at ACSC which is part of ACSW 2011.