etrainer [at] uci [dot] edu

I am a third year PhD student at the University of California, Irvine in the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences with a concentration in the field of Informatics. I also graduated with a B.S. in Information and Computer Science from UCI in 2005.

My advisor is David Redmiles, whose research group is working on problems in Human-Computer Interaction, Software Engineering, Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, among others.

In spring 2008, I TA'd for In4matx 143: Information Visualization.

My research interests include software visualization, collaborative software development, intelligent user interfaces, software engineering, computer-supported cooperative work, and human-computer interaction.

Continuous Coordination

I am a member of the "Continuous Coordination" (CC) research group which recognizes the need for informal awareness-based approaches (e.g. e-mail, IM, central "dashboard" displays, multiple monitors) in software development in addition to traditional formal, process-oriented approaches (e.g. configuration management, workflow). CC as a paradigm is especially useful when applied to global software development, where collaboration suffers due to a lack of context and awareness of other colleagues' activities.

Ariadne

I am currently working with David Redmiles and Cleidson de Souza on the Ariadne project, a Java-based plug-in to the Eclipse IDE that visualizes the social networks derived from distributed software projects. Ariadne builds the call-graph from a software project using a static analysis of the source code. The default call-graph generator analyzes Java code, but since the call-graph generator is pluggable, one can easily imagine a generator for C++, C#, etc. After creating the call-graph, Ariadne automatically connects to the configuration management repository associated with the project to retrieve authorship information. Again, the authorship generator is a plugin. We provide a CVS authorship annotator by default, but this could be extended to other types of CM systems such as Subversion. With the authorship information, Ariadne creates a structure called a "social call-graph", or a call-graph annotated with authorship information. From the social call-graph, Ariadne generates a sociogram (social network) and displays it using a desired visualization plugin, the default being Prefuse. Graphs can be exported to our own XML-based format, GraphML, or matrix formats suitable for importing into social network anaylsis programs such as UCINET. Through Eclipse's plug-in mechanism, Ariadne supports custom visualizations, call graph generators, and project repositories extending the tool's base feature set.

My research team received a grant from the Undergraduate Research Opportunities Program (UROP) in 2004, as well as an Eclipse Innovation Grant in 2005 for our work on Ariadne. For the latter grant, I presented Ariadne with my colleague Stephen Quirk at the Eclipse Technology Exchange (ETX) workshop at the OOPSLA conference in October of 2005.

Consortiums

• Trainer, E. "Connecting the Social and Technical Aspects of Computing with Visualization," In Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human Centric Computing, IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, 2008, in press.

Workshop Papers

• Al-Ani, B., Trainer, E., Ripley, R., Sarma, A., van der Hoek, A., Redmiles, D.F., "Continuous Coordination within the Context of Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering," In Proceedings of the 2008 International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering (CHASE), held in conjunction with The 2008 International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), ACM, New York, NY, pp. 1-4.


• Trainer, E., Quirk, S., de Souza, C. R. B., Redmiles, D.F., "Bridging the Gap between Technical and Social Dependencies with Ariadne," In Proceedings of the 2005 OOPSLA Workshop on Eclipse Technology Exchange, ACM, New York, pp. 26-30.


• de Souza, C.R.B., Dourish, P., Redmiles, D.F., Quirk, S., and Trainer, E., "From Technical Dependencies to Social Dependencies," In Proceedings of the 2004 Workshop on Social Networks, held in conjunction with The 2004 Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), available at http://www.ischool.washington.edu/mcdonald/cscw04/

Journals

• Al-Ani, B., Redmiles, D., van der Hoek, A., Alvim, M., da Silva, I., Mangano, N., Trainer, E., Sarma, A., "Continuous Coordination within Software Engineering Teams: Concepts and Tool Support," In Journal of Computer Science and Engineering in Arabic, Special Issue on Software Engineering, V. x, 2008, pp. x-x.


• Redmiles, D., van der Hoek, A., Al-Ani, B., Hildenbrand, T., Quirk, S., Sarma, A., Silveira Silva Filho, R., de Souza, C., Trainer, E., "Continuous Coordination: A New Paradigm to Support Globally Distributed Software Development Projects", Wirtschaftsinformatik, Special Issue on the Industrialization of Software Development, V. 49, 2007, pp. 28-38.

Conference Proceedings

• Trainer, E., Quirk, S., de Souza, C.R.B., and Redmiles, D.F., “Analyzing a Socio-Technical Visualization Tool Using Usability Inspection Methods”, In Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human Centric Computing, IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, 2008, in press.


• de Souza, C.R.B., Quirk, S., Trainer, E., and Redmiles, D.F., “Supporting Collaborative Software Development through the Visualization of Socio-Technical Dependencies,” In Proceedings of the 2007 International ACM Conference on Supporting Group Work, ACM, New York, NY, 2007, pp. 147-156.