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Using social agents to visualize software scenarios

Published: 04 September 2006 Publication History

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.

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Cited By

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  • (2009)An Overview of 3D Software VisualizationIEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics10.1109/TVCG.2008.8615:1(87-105)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2009
  • (2008)Visualizing inter-dependencies between scenariosProceedings of the 4th ACM symposium on Software visualization10.1145/1409720.1409744(145-153)Online publication date: 16-Sep-2008
  • (2007)Clarity for StakeholdersProceedings of the 2007 Fifth International Workshop on Comparative Evaluation in Requirements Engineering10.1109/CERE.2007.3(1-10)Online publication date: 16-Oct-2007
  • Show More Cited By

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cover image ACM Conferences
SoftVis '06: Proceedings of the 2006 ACM symposium on Software visualization
September 2006
199 pages
ISBN:1595934642
DOI:10.1145/1148493
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 04 September 2006

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Author Tags

  1. ScenarioML
  2. interactive animation
  3. scenario analysis
  4. social autonomous characters

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Cited By

View all
  • (2009)An Overview of 3D Software VisualizationIEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics10.1109/TVCG.2008.8615:1(87-105)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2009
  • (2008)Visualizing inter-dependencies between scenariosProceedings of the 4th ACM symposium on Software visualization10.1145/1409720.1409744(145-153)Online publication date: 16-Sep-2008
  • (2007)Clarity for StakeholdersProceedings of the 2007 Fifth International Workshop on Comparative Evaluation in Requirements Engineering10.1109/CERE.2007.3(1-10)Online publication date: 16-Oct-2007
  • (2006)On a Mixed-Methods Evaluation of a Social-Agent Scenario VisualizationProceedings of the Fourth Internationa Workshop on Comparative Evaluation in Requirements Engineering10.1109/CERE.2006.7(60-5)Online publication date: 11-Sep-2006

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