Live-visualization of source code artifacts for a software engineering-demonstrator

Software Engineering is the discipline of construction and maintenance of largescale software systems with predictable and adequate quality and cost. Fraunhofer IESE is a research organization which aims to advance the state-of-the-art in Software Engineering. IESE uses prototypes to demonstrate the effectiveness of Software Engineering methods and tools. As software is immaterial, a problem arises when trying to demonstrate applied software engineering methods and their correlations in a reasonable manner. The information that is capable to explain the applied software engineering methods is represented by relevant software engineering artifacts. Currently existing approaches are not seen as sufficient by Fraunhofer IESE. This thesis defines an innovative way of displaying appropriate software engineering artifacts that demonstrate applied software engineering methods. The resulting Software Engineering Explained (SEE) Demonstrator is a distributed software system that performs these demonstrations. This system displays the named artifacts by remote controlling the respective tool that generated the artifact alongside descriptive information. Several distinct perspectives on these artifacts can be displayed simultaneously to satisfy the information need of different stakeholders. The Demonstrator is extensible in respect of the tools that display artifacts and the software that is demonstrated. The system has been successfully instantiated and demonstrated several different software components. It has already proved its concept and usefulness at the CeBIT and Embedded World fairs in 2013 and as part of the living lab "Smart Farming" at Fraunhofer IESE, which is a laboratory environment to isolate technical challenges and to provide a platform for conducting empirical studies