André van der Hoek’s research while affiliated with University of California, Irvine and other places

Software design is a set of activities and decisions involved in constructing a software system, ranging from high-level architecture and conceptual design to code design. Decisions made during the design process have a long-lasting impact on various qualities of a system, such as modularity, maintainability, scalability, robustness, security, usability, and performance. Despite its important role in software development, design is still considered something of an art-particularly in terms of design as an activity rather than design as a product or outcome. With the increasing societal impact of software and the potential use of AI in development, design has a new and larger role to play in the engineering of modern software systems. This new workshop aims to bring together researchers, practitioners, and educators who are interested in any aspect of software design, to discuss novel approaches to design, and to identify open challenges and future directions for the field.

Scholars have investigated numerous barriers to accessible software development tools and processes for Blind and Low Vision (BLV) developers. However, the research community has yet to study the accessibility of software development meetings, which are known to play a crucial role in software development practice. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 26 BLV software professionals about software development meeting accessibility. We found four key themes related to in-person and remote software development meetings: (1) participants observed that certain meeting activities and software tools used in meetings were inaccessible, (2) participants performed additional labor in order to make meetings accessible, (3) participants avoided disclosing their disability during meetings due to fear of career repercussions, (4) participants suggested technical, social and organizational solutions for accessible meetings, including developing their own solutions. We suggest recommendations and design implications for future accessible software development meetings including technical and policy-driven solutions.

Network Analysis has traditionally been applied to analyzing interactions among learners in online learning platforms such as discussion boards. However, there are opportunities to bring Network Analysis to bear on networks representing learners' mental models of course material, rather than learner interactions. This paper describes the construction and analysis of collaborative educational networks based on concept maps created by undergraduates. Concept mapping activities were deployed throughout two separate quarters of a large General Education (GE) course about sustainability and technology at a large university on the West Coast of the United States. A variety of Network Analysis metrics are evaluated on their ability to predict an individual learner's understanding based on that learner's contributions to a network representing the collective understanding of all learners in the course. Several of the metrics significantly correlated with learner performance, especially those that compare an individual learner's conformity to the larger group's consensus. The novel network metrics based on collective networks of learner concept maps are shown to produce stronger and more reproducible correlations with learner performance than metrics traditionally used in the literature to evaluate concept maps. This paper thus demonstrates that Network Analysis in conjunction with collective networks of concept maps can provide insights into learners' conceptual understanding of course material.

The whiteboard plays a crucial role in the day-to-day lives of software architects, as they frequently will organize meetings at the whiteboard to discuss a new architecture, some proposed changes to an existing architecture, a mismatch between a prescribed architecture and its code, and more. While much has been studied about software architects, the architectures they produce, and how they produce them, a detailed understanding of these whiteboards meetings is still lacking. In this paper, we contribute a mixed-methods study involving semi-structured interviews and a subsequent survey to understand the perceptions of software architects on whiteboard architecture meetings. We focus on four aspects: (1) why do they hold these meetings, (2) what is the impact of the experience levels of the participants in these meetings, (3) how do the architects document the meetings, and (4) what kinds of changes are made in downstream activities to the work produced after the meetings have concluded? In studying these aspects, we identify eleven observations related to both technical aspects and social aspects of the meetings. These insights have implications for further research, offer concrete advice to practitioners, and suggest ways of educating future software architects.

The whiteboard plays a crucial role in the day-to-day lives of software architects, as they frequently will organize meetings at the whiteboard to discuss a new architecture, some proposed changes to the architecture, a mismatch between the architecture and the code, and more. While much has been studied about software architects, the architectures they produce, and how they produce them, a detailed understanding of these whiteboards meetings is still lacking. In this paper, we contribute a mixed-methods study involving semi-structured interviews and a subsequent survey to understand the perceptions of software architects on whiteboard architecture meetings. We focus on five aspects: (1) why do they hold these meetings, what is the impact of the experience levels of the participants in these meetings, how do the architects document the meetings, what kinds of changes are made after the meetings have concluded and their results are moved to implementation, and what role do digital whiteboards plays? In studying these aspects, we identify 12 observations related to both technical aspects and social aspects of the meetings. These insights have implications for further research, offer concrete advice to practitioners, provide guidance for future tool design, and suggest ways of educating future software architects.

Wikidata is a publicly available, crowdsourced knowledge base that contains interlinked concepts structured for use by intelligent systems. While Wikidata has experienced rapid growth, it is far from complete and faces challenges that prevent it from being used to its full potential. In this paper, we propose a novel method for improving Wikidata by engaging undergraduate students to contribute previously missing knowledge via concept mapping assignments. Rather than allow students to edit Wikidata directly, we describe a workflow in which knowledge is constructed by students and then reviewed by an expert. We present a case study in which we deployed a workflow in a large undergraduate course about sustainability, and find that it was able to contribute a substantial number of high quality statements that persisted in and contributed previously missing knowledge to Wikidata. This work provides a preliminary workflow for improving Wikidata based on classroom assignments, as well as recommendations for how future educational projects could continue to improve Wikidata or other public knowledge bases.

Meetings have always been a significant part of working life and software development is no exception, with meetings of all kinds taking place daily. One type of meeting that is critical to software development that has not been widely studied to date is the recurring software maintenance meeting: a regularly scheduled meeting during which the primary product leads consider emerging issues and new directions for an already deployed and functioning software system. In this paper, we describe preliminary results of our ongoing analysis of ten consecutive recurring maintenance meetings of the architecture committee of a major healthcare software company. The results provide a foundation for further analysis in terms of first building a categorization of the kinds of discussions that take place. We present the setting, our approach to analysis, and preliminary observations. A primary outcome is that the kinds of discussions are much more varied than one might have initially expected.