Agile Surface Engineering

The Agile Surface Engineering (ASE) group at the University of Calgary is headed by Dr. Frank Maurer and conducts industry-oriented research on application engineering for digital surfaces, agile methods, and API design & usability.

Innovative Software Applications

By working with industrial partners, we are developing advanced prototypes of software applications. These serve as case studies into more fundamental software engineering questions like "What is good software design?" or "How can we build complex systems simply?". We are/were working on the following applications:

• eGrid (Partners: TRLabs, NSERC, DextrusPro, ENMAX): Using digital tables to support the control room operation of utility companies
• TableNOC (Partners: TRLabs, ivrnet): Using tables and/or wall sized displays to monitor and control telephony networks

APIs, Toolkits and Tools

APIs embody the building blocks for constructing software systems. Toolkits allow developers to extend and enhance APIs. Tools are ready-to-go system prototypes that can be used as is without any programming necessary. The following list includes APIs, toolkits and tools that were developed by the ASE team:

• Gesture Toolkit(Partners: SurfNet): A device independent toolkit for multi-touch gesture recognition & automated testing for WPF 4 and Silverlight applications
• Iosremote Connector (Partners: SurfNet): An iPhone API for making remote calls between PCs and iPhones/iPads
• ActiveStory Enhanced (Partners: TRLabs, ivrnet): Low-fi prototyping and distributed usability testing to support agile teams in designing user interactions.
• FitClipse (Partners: Pyxis Technologies, NSERC): Eclipse and VisualStudio plugins for refactoring executable acceptance tests based on GreenPepper and Fit.

Agile Methods

The ASE lab started to focus research effort on agile methods in the late 1990ies and is now one of the leading research groups in this area [Dingsøyr, Dyba, Moe: Agile Software Development: An Introduction and Overview in: Agile Software Development Current Research and Future Directions, Springer, 2010]. Current projects focus on how to handle cross-cutting concerns in agile processes, scaling agile methods and agile requirements:

• Example-driven development: (Partners: Pyxis Technologies, NSERC): Investigate the use of examples in driving software development projects
• Taggy - Agile requirements: Investigate how agile teams can handle requirements effectively and how distributed agile teams can manage the requirements knowledge contained in emails and other textual forms of communication
• Agile Interaction Design: Investigate approaches that help agile teams to not only build useful but also usable software
• Test-driven development of user interfaces: Investigate ways to enable test-first TDD of GUI-based applications
• Tool support for exploratory testing: Investigate ways of enhancing manual exploratory testing with automated testing techniquies
• Scaling agile (Partners: Pyxis Technologies, NSERC, IBM): Investigate software product lines, test-driven code search and distributed agile teams

API Usability and Software Design

The line of research is driven by a simple question "(How) can we build complex systems simply?" [ J. Wing: Five Deep Questions in Computing, Communications of the ACM, Vol 51, No 1, Jan 2008]. We are investigating what constitutes good software design by developing APIs and study their usability.

• Interaction-driven design of GIS APIs: Study which APIs make it easy for developers to create table-based GIS applications
• Impact of tests on API usability: Study if the availability of tests improves the usability of APIs
• Multi-touch gesture APIs: Investigate APIs that enable developers to create gesture-based applications for multi-touch devices
• Tangible Detection API: Investigate APIs that enable developers to create applications using tangible objects for interaction
• Software Engineering for the Cloud

Please follow the publications, multipedia, as well as the projects links on the top to find out more about our work. The Software section will lead you to open source software developed by our group.