Scenario Visualization

This project was a collaboration between myself, my advisor, and Thomas Alspaugh, another Informatics professor who works in the area of requirements engineering. It came out of a series of discussions about how stories and narrative structure are similar to the scenarios used in requirements engineering. Using the codebase that my advisor has developed since his days at the media lab, we built a tool to visualize scenarios that describe the functioning of a software system as a social interaction among groups of animated characters. We did a small evaluation, showing that the technique helped users to find various sorts of errors in the scenarios more readily than the text of the scenarios alone. [video]

Publications

Alspaugh, T.A., Tomlinson, B., and Baumer, E. 2006. Using Social Agents to Visualize Software Scenarios. ACM Symposium on Software Visualization (SOFTVIS). Brighton, UK.

Alspaugh, T.A., Baumer, E., and Tomlinson, B. 2006. On a Mixed-Methods Evaluation of a Social-Agent Scenario Visualization. Fourth International Workshop on Comparative Evaluation in Requirements Engineering (CERE 2006). Minneapolis, MN.