FORCE - eXtended Reality Software Engineering

Since its inception, software engineering (SE) has witnessed substantial progress. However, despite numerous efforts, it has yet to depart from the traditional two-dimensional model employed by Integrated Development Environments (IDEs). Developers continue to interact with what Brooks called “castles in the air” through the confines of a flat and cumbersome IDE window. One domain, XR (eXtended Reality, which encompasses both Vir- tual (VR) and Augmented Reality (AR)) has experienced noteworthy advancements in recent years: VR technology has reached a level of maturity where consumer hardware has become capable of delivering a fluid and immersive experience, opening up new avenues of research into the stale field of IDEs.
The FORCE project addresses these advancements. Our primary objective is to develop a comprehensive extended reality software engineering methodology, complemented by appropriate tool support. This methodology encom- passes the entire software lifecycle, i.e., design, development, maintenance and comprehension.

To achieve this goal, we envision the creation of a novel immersive and collaborative extended reality SE environ- ment, which offers an interactive 3D representation of software systems, building upon our previous work on code cities. Developers will have the ability to design new code through cyber-physical interactions (e.g., manipulat- ing a class cube generates the corresponding source code). Maintenance activities, such as refactorings triggered by moving/changing objects, can also be performed. In the environment, each developer is represented by an avatar, a virtual persona, which the environment tracks in terms of past and current actions and achievements. The FORCE project seeks to fuse extended reality technologies and collaborative environments, enabling more immersive, efficient, and effective software development processes. The FORCE project addresses the following challenges:

- Immersive Software Visualization: We aim to design and develop an effective approach for creating a scalable representation of software within a novel immersive design and development environment.

- Cyber-Physical Design & Development: We seek to investigate the most suitable cyber-physical interactions for facilitating immersive software design and development processes.

- Data Modeling & Integration: We aim to explore strategies for modeling and integrating the data generated and utilized by individuals using the environment.

The FORCE project is structured into three distinct research tracks: Immersive Visualization, Cyber-Physical De- sign & Development, and Data Modeling & Integration. The first two tracks will be assigned to PhD students, and will deal mostly with addressing the aforementioned challenges from a scientific point of view. For the 3rd track we require a postdoctoral researcher skilled in meta-modeling and data handling to aid in the synergistic integration of the PhD students’ prototypes. Additionally, there is a development “Demonstrator” track, which serves as a prac- tical implementation of our research findings. For the Demonstrator, we will leverage our institute’s CodeLounge research & development center, enlisting a professional software engineer to refine the students’ prototypes into a full-fledged immersive extended reality environment for software engineering.