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Team co-location is a hallmark of Agile software development that advocates face-to-face interaction and close collaboration among team members. Distributed teams, however, use Agile methods despite the separation of team members through space, time and culture. Little is known about how distributed teams use Agile methods for software development. A Grounded Theory research study that involved 55 participants from 38 different software companies in the USA, India, and Australia was carried out to investigate the key concern of distributed teams in Agile software development. This thesis proposes “The Theory of One Team” which explains how a distributed team in Agile software development adopts explicit strategies for bridging spatial, temporal, and socio-cultural distances, while facing critical impact factors, in order to become one team. This thesis primarily describes how a distributed team resolves the key concern of becoming one team. This thesis also provides the members of a distributed team with techniques for building trust with one another. In addition, this thesis serves to inform senior managers about the importance of supporting distributed teams in Agile software development.

Most software visualization systems and tools are designed from a single-user perspective and are bound to the desktop and IDEs. These design decisions do not allow users to analyse software collaboratively or to easily interact and navigate visualizations within a co-located environment at the same time. This thesis presents an exploratory study of collaborative software visualization using multi-touch tables in a co-located environment. The thesis contributes a richer understanding of how pairs of developers make use of shared visualizations on large multi-touch tables to gain insight into the design of software systems. We designed a collaborative software visualization application, called Source-Vis, that contained a suite of 13 visualization techniques adapted for multi-touch interaction. We built two large multi-touch tables (28 and 48 inches) following existing hardware designs, to explore and evaluate SourceVis. We then conducted both qualitative and quantitative user studies, culminating in a study of 44 professional software developers working in pairs. We found that pairs preferred joint group work, used a variety of coupling styles, and made many transitions between coupling and arrangement styles. For collaborative group work we recommend designing for joint group work over parallel individual work, supporting a flexible variety of coupling styles, and supporting fluid transitions between coupling and arrangement styles. We found that the preferred style for joint group work was closely coupled and arranged side by side. We found some global functionally was not easily accessible. We found some of the user interactions and visual interface elements were not designed consistently. For the design of collaborative software visualizations we recommend designing visualizations for closely coupled arrangements with rotation features, providing functionality in the appropriate locality, and providing consistent user interactions and visual interface design. We

Freshly created objects are a blank slate: their mutable state and their constant properties must be initialised before they can be used. Programming languages like Java typically support object initialisation by providing constructor methods. This thesis examines the actual initialisation of objects in real-world programs to determine whether constructor methods support the initialisation that programmers actually perform. Determining which object initialisation techniques are most popular and how they can be identified will allow language designers to better understand the needs of programmers, and give insights that VM designers could use to optimise the performance of language implementations, reduce memory consumption, and improve garbage collection behaviour. Traditional profiling typically either focuses on timing, or uses sampling or heap snapshots to approximate whole program analysis. Classifying the behaviour of objects throughout their lifetime requires analysis of all program behaviour without approximation. This thesis presents two novel whole-program object profilers: one using purely class modification (#prof ), and a hybrid approach utilising class modification and JVM support (rprof ). #prof modifies programs using aspect-oriented programming tools to generate and aggregate data and examines objects that enter different collections to determine whether correlation exists between initialisation behaviour and the use of equality operators and collections. rprof confirms the results of an existing static analysis study of field initialisation using runtime analysis, and provides a novel study of object initialisation behaviour patterns.

Self-organizing teams are a hallmark of Agile software development, directly a ecting team e ectiveness and project success. Agile software development, and in particular the Scrum method, emphasizes self-organizing teams but does not provide clear guidelines on how teams should become and remain self-organizing. Based on Grounded Theory research involving 58 Agile prac- titioners from 23 di erent software organizations in New Zealand and In- dia, this thesis presents a grounded theory of self-organizing Agile teams. The theory of self-organizing Agile teams explains how software development teams take on informal, implicit, transient, and spontaneous roles and per- form balanced practices while facing critical environmental factors, in order to become self-organizing. The roles are: Mentor, Co-ordinator, Translator, Champion, Promoter, and Terminator. The practices involve balancing free- dom and responsibility, cross-functionality and specialization, and continuous learning and iteration pressure. The factors are senior management support and level of customer involvement. This thesis will help teams and their coaches better understand their roles and responsibilities as a self-organizing Agile team. This thesis will also serve to educate senior management and customers about the importance of supporting these teams

ASWEC is a joint conference of Engineers Australia and the Australian Computer Society reporting through the Engineers Australia/ACS Joint Board on Software Engineering.

UPMARC, Facilitating Concurrent and Parallel Programming in Mainstream Programming Languages

Unrestricted, This study was conducted in 11 schools across 5 school districts and solicited responses from 20 teachers. This study found a relationship between instructional strategies appropriate for gifted students and teachers' perceptions of contributions the strategies made to learning. The literature review section examined the modern focus on gifted education. This study included a cursory examination of how American gifted students compare to the preparation and performance of their international counterparts (Ross, 1993). The literature also provided a glimpse into what motivates gifted students. The literature review also discussed several other selected factors such as family stability and known effective instructional techniques for gifted students (Beck, 2001; Coleman, 2006; Corbett & Wilson, 2002; Reis, Colbert, & Hébert 2005). The literature was examined with a focus on current instructional strategies and learning skills. The literature established that despite teacher perceptions, given appropriate instructional strategies, the limit for student achievement is immeasurable (Gentry & Neu, 1998). Data analysis was facilitated by cross-tabulation using the statistical package for the social sciences. Responses to each survey item regarding the frequency of use, motivation for use, and location learned for each instructional strategy and each learning skill were cross-tabulated against each other to determine positive comparisons. The teacher responses were examined using comparative analysis because the sample size was small. Data analysis of teacher responses was presented in tables. A large percentage (89.2%) of respondents indicated that they frequently used specialized instructional strategies and learning skills and felt these strategies contributed to gifted students' learning.; The use of the strategies and skills were most likely representative of what gifted students in 7th grade English classes are experiencing in the region in and around the suburbs and

GO is a new object-oriented programming language developed at Google by Rob Pike, Ken Thompson, and others. GO has the potential to become a major programming language. GO deserves an evaluation. Design patterns document reoccurring problems and their solutions. The problems presented are programming language independent. Their solutions, however, are dependent on features programming languages provide. In this thesis we use design patterns to evaluate GO. We discuss GO features that help or hinder implementing design patterns, and present a pattern catalogue of all 23 Gang-of-Four design patterns with GO specific solutions. Furthermore, we present GoHotDraw, a GO port of the pattern dense drawing application framework JHotDraw. We discuss design and implementation differences between the two frameworks with regards to GO.

Multiple dispatch uses the run time types of more than one argument to a method call to determine which method body to run. While several languages over the last 20 years have provided multiple dispatch, most object-oriented languages still support only single dispatch - forcing programmers to implement multiple dispatch manually when required. This thesis presents an empirical study of the use of multiple dispatch in practice, considering six languages that support multiple dispatch. We hope that this study will help programmers understand the uses and abuses of multiple dispatch; virtual machine implementors optimise multiple dispatch; and language designers to evaluate the choice of providing multiple dispatch in new programming languages.

eXtreme programming (XP) is one of a new breed of methods, collectively known as the agile methods, that are challenging conventional wisdom regarding systems development processes and practices. Practitioners specifically designed the agile methods to meet the business problems and challenges we face building software today. As such, these methods are receiving significant attention in practitioner literature. In order to operate effectively in the world of vague and changing requirements, XP moves the emphasis away from document-centric processes into practices that enable people. The Customer is the primary organisational facing role in eXtreme Programming (XP). The Customer's explicit responsibilities are to drive the project, providing project requirements (user stories) and quality control (acceptance testing). Unfortunately the customer must also shoulder a number of implicit responsibilities including liaison with external project stakeholders, especially project funders, clients, and end users, while maintaining the trust of both the development team and the wider business. This thesis presents a grounded theory of XP software development requirements elicitation, communication, and acceptance, which was guided by three major research questions. What is the experience of being an XP Customer? We found that teams agree that the on-site customer practice is a drastic improvement to the traditional document-centric approaches. Our results indicate, however, that the customers are consistently under pressure and commit long hours to the project in order to fulfil the customer role. So while this approach to requirements is achieving excellent results, it also appears to be unsustainable and thus constitutes a great risk to XP projects. Who is the XP Customer? The initial definition of XP resulted in many people interpreting the onsite customer to be a single person. This research has highlighted that a customer team always exists, and goes further to outline th

3D web software visualisation has always been expensive, special purpose, and hard to program. Most of the technologies used require large amounts of scripting, are not reliable on all platforms, are binary formats, or no longer maintained. We can make end-user web software visualisation of object-oriented programs cheap, portable, and easy by using Extensible (X3D) 3D Graphics, which is a new open standard. In this thesis we outline our experience with X3D and discuss the suitability of X3D as an output format for software visualisation.

Although both agile development methods and interaction design aim to build quality software that meets the user's needs, each approaches development from a different perspective. Agile development methods describe activities addressing the coding (and in some cases the process management) part of software development, whereas interaction design methods describe activities for developing that aspect of the software that will be perceived by the user. Agile development and interaction design each have little to say about the other, despite the reality that both approaches are combined in practice. There has been little investigation into how the two processes work together, and the issues that arise. To aim for a better understanding of practice, we conducted grounded theory research about real-world software teams who combine interaction design and agile development. The results provided insights into interaction design being done up front (before implementation begins), the structure of the development iterations, the effect of incorporating interaction design techniques into the agile development iterations, as well as the role of the interaction designer on agile teams. The analysis also highlighted areas that may benefit from further research.

Aspects allow a developer to externally add new functionality to a program. This additional functionality may also throw new exceptions that will flow through the program execution until they are handled. Moreover, aspects can also be used to handle exceptions thrown by base code or even other aspects. Unfortunately, exceptions thrown by aspects --- or exceptions that should be handled by them --- may flow through the program execution in unexpected ways leading to failures such as uncaught exceptions or exceptions being caught by the wrong handlers. In a previous empirical study we investigated the causes of such failures in Aspect-Oriented programs. In this paper we present causes of such failures as a catalogue of bug patterns for exception handling in Aspect-Oriented programs.

Unrestricted aliasing is a problem endemic to object oriented programming. It allows notions of encapsulation fundamental to object oriented programming to be violated. This thesis describes ConstrainedJava, an implementation of a language that provides alias control via a much stronger encapsulation guarantees than traditional object-oriented programming languages, integrated with a constraint system. Unlike most existing aliasing control systems, this encapsulation system integrates well with untyped dynamic languages such as ConstrainedJava. This stronger form of encapsulation has been enhanced to make it easier to write practical programs while still providing useful encapsulation guarantees.

Persuasive technology (PT) has been defined by B. J. Fogg as "any interactive computing system designed to change peoples attitudes or behaviors". The kinds of attitudes people hold, and the behaviours they exhibit, are influenced by culture, so cultural beliefs play a large role in persuasion. The cross-cultural psychology literature has demonstrated the power of culture on attitude change. To date, however, there has been limited persuasive technology research outside of countries characterised as having individualist culture, where individualism describes cultures in which society members have a primarily individual identity. Little research has explicitly investigated the relationship between persuasive technology and culture. In this thesis, we investigated the hypothesis that persuasive technology is more effective when it reflects the culture of its intended target audience. Firstly, we established a set of effective, culturally-relevant persuasive technology strategies, almost all of which are targeted at use in tools for collectivist audiences. The strategies are based on a combination of findings from the cross-cultural psychology literature focused on the dimensions of individualism and collectivism, an analysis of existing PT strategies, and qualitative insights. Secondly, we developed a culturally-relevant PT prototype based on several of our strategies, in the form of two versions of a game titled Smoke? about smoking cessation. One version of Smoke? was designed to be more persuasive for a NZ European player audience, while the other was designed to be more persuasive for a Maori player audience. We conducted focus groups with potential players, the insights of which guided how we applied several of our culturally-relevant PT strategies in the design of the two game versions. Finally, we evaluated both game versions on individualist, and collectivist test players, using both quantitative and qualitative methods. The results of our evaluation support o

Video games are a form of software and thus an obvious object of study in Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Interaction with video games differs from the usual understanding of HCI, however, because people play video games rather than use them. In this dissertation we ask: " How can we analyse human-computer interaction in video games when the interaction in question is play?" We propose video game values, defined as sustained beliefs about preferable conduct during play, as a basis for video game HCI. In order to describe and analyse play we use activity theory, focusing on how the interface mediates players' beliefs about preferable conduct. Activity theory allows us to address the multiple levels of context and detail in play as well as the role of conflict. We employ a qualitative case study methodology to gather data about five popular video games: Civilization III, Fable, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Half-Life 2, and The Sims 2. Our core data comes from observation and interview sessions with twenty-five experienced players of these games. We collected further data based on the games' interfaces, participant observation, and documentation such as manuals and walkthroughs. We make three key contributions to video game HCI: 1) We introduce video game values as a means to analyse play as a form of human-computer interaction and show how the values of PAIDIA and LUDUS influence all aspects of play; 2) we develop a video game activity framework for describing and analysing video game play at multiple levels of detail and context; and 3) we extend the video game activity framework to include contradictions and breakdowns as a means to describe and analyse the role of conflict and challenge in video game play.

Human Computer Interaction research has a unique challenge in understanding the activity systems of creative professionals, and designing the user-interfaces to support their work. In these activities, the user is involved in the process of building and editing complex digital artefacts through a process of continued refinement, as is seen in computer aided architecture, design, animation, movie-making, 3D modelling, interactive media (such as shockwave-flash), as well as audio and music production. This thesis examines the ways in which abstraction mechanisms present in music production systems interplay with producers' activity through a collective case study of seventeen professional producers. From the basis of detailed observations and interviews we examine common abstractions provided by the ubiquitous multitrack-mixing metaphor and present design implications for future systems.