May 2009 – Marlena's Blog

The Game is Afoot: Abstract Accepted for PNSQC

: Image via Wikipedia

Yesterday, my inbox had a lovely note from the PNSQC folks saying that my abstract is accepted. Immediate freaking out and some really bad cube-dancing commenced. I was already committed to turning out a really great thesis over this summer, and now I’ll be turning out a really great thesis that people will possibly read! The conference folks still have to approve my final paper, so my presentation will be pending their approval. I was looking a little more thoroughly at the conference web-site. It turns out that even if your paper is accepted, your peers will GRADE your prezo with a red, yellow or green card. Jeez!

All freaking out aside, what a great validation of my topic. Any tips for presenting or paper writing? God, I love Portland!

Picasso Ate My Metrics Paper: Visualizing Software Metrics with Treemaps

This past semester, one of the classes I took was a class about Software Metrics. I was required to write a paper, so I wrote about visualizing software metrics. All in all, it was a pretty intense semester. I’ve been settling on a masters thesis topic, which you can read a little about in my previous post. I’ve written lots of Processing code and been reading through Edward Tufte’s books. I attended his seminar and gave my own seminar, at work, about Data Visualization.

I guess my artistic side broke through this past semester and demanded my full attention. Reading through my posts, you would never know that there was a time in my life when I did lots of painting and drawing. The painting below is a reproduction of a Picasso I painted for my mom during this period. Last week, I finally broke down and ordered the Adobe Design Premium suite which includes illustrator and Flash. Yay for educational discounts!

picassodemom

This semester has been all about my artistic impulses and my obsession with technology having a full-on, stay-awake-late, grab-the-bull-by-the-paintbrush collision. The days when I was writing about visualization and software for job, school and pleasure all at the same time made me smile and think, “it’s good to be me today.” I know that most people don’t get even 1 day of that and it means that I am finally, after 9 years of higher education, going the right way with my studies.

I’m posting my paper here. It seemed prudent, before delving into research on visualizing test data, to see what was already out there. What I found was an emphasis on craziness, a disregard for human-computer interaction and any principles of data visualization. The glaring exception was the body of work on Treemaps. If you look at the references of the original paper on Treemaps (I can’t post it because of ACM), you will find a reference to The Visual Display of Quantitative Information. For this reason, I’ve pretty much stuck with Treemaps in my research.

Are treemaps useful for visualizing the quality of a software system? I will be working over the next few months to answer that question, and smiling a lot in the process.

Submitted an Abstract to PNSQC

I’m posting the abstract I just submitted to PNSQC. It’s also the abstract of the thesis I’m writing for my Masters. I’ve submitted a poster to the Grace Hopper Conference, but never before have I submitted a full-on paper requiring a full-on presentation. I chose PNSQC for 2 reasons: the focus is more on the practical side, unlike some of the ACM conferences and the conference is in Portland, Oregon. God, I love Portland.

Anyway, here is what I submitted:

Visualizing Software Quality

Moving quality forward will require better methods of assessing quality more quickly for large software systems. Assessing how much to test a software application is consistently a challenge for software testers especially when requirements are less than clear and deadlines are constrained.

For my graduate research and my job as a software tester, I have been looking at how visualization can benefit software testing. In assessing the quality of large-scale software systems, data visualization can be used as an aid. Visualizations can show complexity in a system, coverage of system or unit tests, where tests are passing vs. failing and which areas of a system contain the most frequent and severe defects.

In order to create visualizations for testing with a high level of utility and trustworthiness, I studied the principles of good data visualizations vs. visualizations with compromised integrity. Reading about these lead me to change some of the graphs that I had been using for my qa assessment and to adopt newer types of visualizations such as treemaps to show me where I should be testing and which areas of source code are more likely to have defects.

This paper will describe the principles of visualization I have been using, the visualizations I have created and how they are used as well as anecdotal evidence of their effectiveness for testing.