SPA Conference session: Legacy data and code visualization with MOOSE - visualize, make sense, transform

One-line description:Make everyone understand the code
 
Session format: Workshop (150 mins) [read about the different session types]
 
Abstract:Visualizing the state of a piece of software to all stakeholders is crucial to understanding. A recent data conversion project was much easier to steer with daily visualizations. MOOSE is a toolset that makes it easy to build a code browser, graph or other visualization of code or data. Several languages are supported out of the box: Java, C, C++ and the host language, Smalltalk. There is also state-of-the-art support for parser construction, so we were able to create a COBOL visualization within a day.

In this workshop you will build a few visualizations and browsers for a small legacy source code and database. You will get a feel for what visualizations you need, to help stakeholders understand what is going on in the code.

References:
http://www.moosetechnology.org/
http://humane-assessment.com/
 
Audience background:Developers, Architects

For managers: if you just want to be impressed by the results, you don’t need to be able to code, but you can work with someone who does, and help out with describing what indicators you would like to see.
 
Benefits of participating:Understand your own or unknown code, visualise the good, the bad and your progress in various areas. Learn to explain the code to all stakeholders.
 
Materials provided:Handouts
USB sticks with environment and legacy code (cross platform)
 
Process:Presentations and exercises interspersed.
Participants work in pairs and show their results to the group.
Laptop needed for each pair

Trial run at Devnology in June. Number of exercises based on the trial run. We are thinking of reducing the number of exercises so participants have more time to show and explain their visualizations to each other. Might switch glamour and mondrian order
 
Detailed timetable:Start Duration Subject
00:00:00 00:10:00 Introduction
00:10:00 00:15:00 Explaining glamour
00:25:00 00:25:00 Create a model browser exercise
00:50:00 00:10:00 Break
01:00:00 00:15:00 Explaining mondrian
01:15:00 00:25:00 Create some complexity and dependency diagrams exercise
01:40:00 00:15:00 Explaining eyesee
01:55:00 00:10:00 Break
02:05:00 00:15:00 Create a burndown chart
02:20:00 00:10:00 Wrap-up
 
Outputs:Take home your handouts and visualizations.
Participants publish their visualization on the wiki after each exercise (take screenshot, upload to wiki)
Gallery of visualizations if a printer/beamer is available
 
History:Trial run at Devnology in June.
 
Presenters
1. Stephan Eggermont
Sensus
2. Willem van den Ende
Living Software B.V.
3.