Open Access
Young but not Naive: Leaders of Tomorrow Expect Limits to Digital Freedom to Preserve Freedom
(2021)
WAR FOR TALENTS MEETS FACIAL EXPRESSION - leveraging recruiting videos in professional service firms
(2020)
VR-V&V
(2023)
To build quality into a software (SW) system necessitates supporting quality-related lifecycle activities during the software development. In software engineering, software Verification and Validation (V&V) processes constitute an inherent part of Software Quality Assurance (SQA) processes. A subset of the V&V activities involved are: 1) bidirectional traceability analysis of requirements to design model elements, and 2) software testing. Yet the complex nature of large SW systems and the dependencies involved in both design models and testing present a challenge to current V&V tools and methods regarding support for trace analysis. One of software’s essential challenges remains its invisibility, which also affects V&V activities. This paper contributes VR-V&V, a Virtual Reality (VR) solution concept towards supporting immersive V&V activities. By visualizing requirements, models, and testing artifacts with dependencies and trace relations immersively, they are intuitively accessible to a larger stakeholder audience such as SQA personnel while supporting digital cognition. Our prototype realization shows the feasibility of supporting immersive bidirectional traceability as well as immersive software test coverage and analysis. The evaluation results are based on a case study demonstrating its capabilities, in particular traceability support was performed with ReqIF, ArchiMate models, test results, test coverage, and test source to test target dependencies.
VR-SysML+Traceability
(2023)
As systems grow in complexity, the interdisciplinary nature of systems engineering makes the visualization and comprehension of the underlying system models challenging for the various stakeholders. This, in turn, can affect validation and realization correctness. Furthermore, stakeholder collaboration is often hindered due to the lack of a common medium to access and convey these models, which are often partitioned across multiple 2D diagrams. This paper contributes VR-SysML, a solution concept for visualizing and interacting with Systems Modeling Language (SysML) models in Virtual Reality (VR). Our prototype realization shows its feasibility, and our evaluation results based on a case study shows its support for the various SysML diagram types in VR, cross-diagram element recognition via our Backplane Followers concept, and depicting further related (SysML and non-SysML) models side-by-side in VR.
VR-GitCity
(2023)
The increasing demand for software functionality necessitates an increasing amount of program source code that is retained and managed in version control systems, such as Git. As the number, size, and complexity of Git repositories increases, so does the number of collaborating developers, maintainers, and other stakeholders over a repository’s lifetime. In particular, visual limitations of command line or two- dimensional graphical Git tooling can hamper repository comprehension, analysis, and collaboration across one or multiple repositories when a larger stakeholder spectrum is involved. This is especially true for depicting repository evolution over time. This paper contributes VR-GitCity, a Virtual Reality (VR) solution concept for visualizing and interacting with Git repositories in VR. The evolution of the code base is depicted via a 3D treemap utilizing a city metaphor, while the commit history is visualized as vertical planes. Our prototype realization shows its feasibility, and our evaluation results based on a case study show its depiction, comprehension, analysis, and collaboration capabilities for evolution, branch, commit, and multi-repository analysis scenarios.
Today’s Industry 4.0 Smart Factories involve complicated and highly automated processes. Nevertheless, certain crucial activities such as machine maintenance remain that require human involvement. For such activities, many factors have to be taken into account, like worker safety or worker qualification. This adds to the complexity of selection and assignment of optimal human resources to the processes and overall coordination. Contemporary Business Process Management (BPM) Systems only provide limited facilities regarding activity resource assignment. To overcome these, this contribution pro- poses a BPM-integrated approach that applies fuzzy sets and rule processing for activity assignment. Our findings suggest that our approach has the potential for improved work distribution and cost savings for Industry 4.0 production processes. Furthermore, the scalability of the approach provides efficient performance even with a large number of concurrent activity assignment requests and can be applied to complex production scenarios with minimal effort.