Using social agents to visualize software scenarios

ABSTRACT

Enabling nonexperts to understand a software system and the scenarios of usage of that system can be challenging. Visually modeling a collection of scenarios as social interactions can provide quicker and more intuitive understanding of the system described by those scenarios. This project combines a scenario language with formal structure and automated tool support (ScenarioML) and an interactive graphical game engine featuring social automomous characters and text-to-speech capabilities. We map scenarios to social interactions by assigning a character to each actor and entity in the scenarios, and animate the interactions among these as social interactions among the corresponding characters. The social interactions can help bring out these important aspects: interactions of multiple agents, pattern and timing of interactions, non-local inconsistencies within and among scenarios, and gaps and missing information in the scenario collection. An exploratory study of this modeling's effectiveness is presented.

REFERENCES

• 1: Alexander, I. 2004. Introduction: Scenarios in system development. In Scenarios, Stories, Use Cases: Through the Systems Development Life-Cycle, I. F. Alexander and N. Maiden, Eds. John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., 3--24.
• 2: Alspaugh, T. A. 2006. Scenarios, business rules, and matching. Technical Report UCI-ISR-06-5, Institute for Software Research, University of California, Irvine.
• 3: Anonymous. 1998. Everyman. In Internet Medieval Source Book, P. Halsall, Ed. http://www.fordham.edu/HALSALL/basis/everyman.html.
• 4: Benner, K., Feather, M. S., Johnson, W. L., and Zor-Man, L. 1992. Utilizing scenarios in the software development process. In IFIP Working Group 8.1 Working Conference on Information Systems Development Processes.
• 5: Blumberg, B. 1996. Old Tricks, New Dogs: Ethology and Interactive Creatures. Media Laboratory, MIT, Cambridge, MA.
• 6: Byrne, R., and Whiten, A., Eds. 1988. Machiavellian Intelligence. Clarendon Press, Oxford.
• 7: Ciceronis, M. T., 55 B. C. De Oratore ad Quintum Fratrem, Liber II. http://www.forumromanum.org/literature/cicero_oratore2.html.
• 8: Downie, M. 2001. behavior, animation, music: the music and movement of synthetic characters. Media Arts & Sciences, MIT, Cambridge, MA.
• 9: Haumer, P., Pohl, K., and Weidenhaupt, K. 1998. Requirements elicitation and validation with real world scenes. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering 24, 12 (Dec.), 1036--1054.
• 10: Marcus, A., Feng, L., and Maletic, J. I. 2003. 3D representations for software visualization. In SoftVis '03: Proceedings of the 2003 ACM Symposium on Software Visualization, 27--37.
• 11: Mateas, M. 1999. An Oz-centric review of interactive drama and believable agents. In Artificial Intelligence Today: Recent Trends and Developments, M. Wooldridge and M. Veloso, Eds., vol. 1600 of Lecture Notes in AI. 297--328.
• 12: Mayer, R. E. 2001. Multimedia Learning. Cambridge University Press.
• 13: Pang, T., Maiden, N., Zachos, K., and Ncube, C. 2005. Do rich media scenarios support requirements discovery? In 11th International Workship on Requirements Engineering: Foundation for Software Quality (REFSQ'05), 152--166.
• 14: Perlin, K., and Goldberg, A. 1996. Improv: A system for scripting interactive actors in virtual worlds. In SIGGRAPH, 205--216.
• 15: Rosedale, P., 2006. Serious Games Summit keynote: You can (not) be serious. http://www.gamasutra.com/features/2006020/carless_01.shtml.
• 16: Ruthruff, J., Creswick, E., Burnett, M., Cook, C., Prabhakararao, S., M. Fisher, I., and Main, M. 2003. End-user software visualizations for fault localization. In SoftVis '03: Proceedings of the 2003 ACM symposium on Software visualization, 123--132.
• 17: Tomlinson, B., Et Al. 2001. AlphaWolf. In Proceedings of SIGGRAPH 2001: conference abstracts and applications.
• 18: Tomlinson, B., Downie, M., Berlin, M., Gray, J., Lyons, D., Cochran, J., and Blumberg, B. 2002. Leashing the AlphaWolves: Mixing user direction with autonomous emotion in a pack of semi-autonomous virtual characters. In Proceedings of the 2002 ACM SIGGRAPH Symposium on Computer Animation (SCA-02), ACM Press, New York, S. N. Spencer, Ed., 7--14.
• 19: Tomlinson, B., Yau, M. L., O'Connell, J., Williams, K., and Yamaoka, S. 2005. The Virtual Raft Project: a mobile interface for interacting with communities of autonomous characters. In CHI Extended Abstracts, 1150--1151.
• 20: Tudoreanu, M. E. 2003. Designing effective program visualization tools for reducing user's cognitive effort. In SoftVis '03: Proceedings of the 2003 ACM symposium on Software visualization, 105--114.
• 21: Wood, D. P., Christel, M. G., and Stevens, S. M. 1994. A multimedia approach to requirements capture and modeling. In First International Conference on Requirements Engineering (ICRE'94), 53--56.
• 22: Zachos, K., and Maiden, N. 2004. ART-SCENE: Enhancing scenario walkthroughs with multi-media scenarios. In 12th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE'04), 360--361.
• 23: Zachos, K., Maiden, N., and Tosar, A. 2005. Rich-media scenarios for discovering requirements. IEEE Software 22, 5 (Sept./Oct.), 89--97.

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  D. Software
  D.2 SOFTWARE ENGINEERING
      D.2.1 Requirements/Specifications

Keywords:
ScenarioML, interactive animation, scenario analysis, social autonomous characters