HI-SEA - Holistic Immersive Software Evolution Ambient

Despite the many progresses that software engineering research and practice have made in developing methods and techniques to tackle the many challenges that developing software entails, the main vehicle to develop software, the integrated development environment (IDE), has essentially remained unchanged since the first IDEs appeared 30 years ago. IDEs certainly progressed to offer support for versioning, integration, and programming in modern languages, but essentially remain mere text editors. They are inappropriate to face the many new challenges of modern software development: Modern development however is faced with new challenges: Developers deal with an exploding amount of data not only related to the source code, but also to complementary –and often neglected– information, such as QÄ websites and documents written in natural language (emails, documentation, instant messages, etc.) revolving around systems. Leveraging such information often comes as an afterthought and manifests itself as simplistic extensions of existing IDEs, in the form of plugins and recommender systems that have a hard time at making it into the spotlight, often remaining at the stage of prototypes.
Our goal is to develop methods and techniques to enable a holistic immersive ambient for software evo- lution, i.e., a visual environment for analyzing existing and developing new software, where the plethora of data revolving around a project is integrated to provide a holistic view and serves as the basis for intelligent recommender systems.