Mr Luke Nguyen-Hoan

About me

I am a PhD candidate in the Department of Computer Science, commenced in February 2008. My research area is in software-intensive systems engineering, and is focused on finding ways of improving the development of software for scientific purposes, potentially by the application of existing knowledge in the software engineering field. Current projects involve investigating the applicability of Visual Domain-Specific Modeling in environmental scientific modeling areas.

2012 - Recording Context & Provenance using Visual Domain-Specific Modeling

How do environmental modellers record context and provenance information?

Is annotating a visual diagram of the experimental set-up an appropriate method of capturing that knowledge?

To find some answers to these questions, we are running a short experiment with environmental modellers. Participants will be interviewed, draw diagrams, and use a visual software interface to record context and provenance information.

The planned experiment will be performed in a one-on-one in-person session lasting no more than one (1) hour, and will involve:

1. A short semi-structured interview where you will be asked questions relating to how you currently record context and provenance information;
2. Reading a one-page summary of a sample scenario;
3. If appropriate, sketch or draw an example of how you would currently record and represent the context and provenance information;
4. Use a Visual-Domain-Specific Modeling approach to record and represent the context and provenance information;
5. A short survey of your experiences during the research project; and
6. A short semi-structured interview where you will be asked questions to explore and confirm your survey answers.

The full information sheet for this project can be found here: Information Sheet (PDF).

A copy of the above summary for distribution can be found here: 1 Page Summary (PDF).

If you are an ecological scientist in Australia and are interested in this project, or located in Canberra and would like to participate, please contact me (my contact details are below).

2011 - Creating Ecological Simulations using Visual Domain-Specific Modeling

How do ecological scientists visualise ecological scenarios and simulations?

Is drawing a diagram better than filling in series of numbers for describing ecological simulations?

To find some answers to these questions, we are running a short experiment with ecological scientists. Participants will be asked to draw diagrams and interact with different software interfaces in order to represent an ecological scenario. They will then complete a short survey and be interviewed on their experiences.

The planned experiment will be performed in a one-on-one in-person session lasting up to two (2) hours, and will involve:

1. Reading a one-page summary of an ecological scenario
2. Drawing a representation of the ecological scenario
3. Using both a visual diagram-based software interface and a traditional fill-in-the-box form-based software interface to create a software model of the ecological scenario
4. Completing a short survey of your experiences during the research project
5. A short semi-structured interview where you will be asked questions relating to your drawing and your experiences using the software interfaces

The full information sheet for this project can be found here: Information Sheet (PDF).

A copy of the above summary for distribution can be found here: 1 Page Summary (PDF).

If you are an ecological scientist at the Australian National University and would like to participate in this project, please contact me (my contact details are below).

2010 - A survey of scientific software development

Luke Nguyen-Hoan, Shayne Flint, Ramesh Sankaranarayana.

Abstract

Software for scientific research purposes has received increased attention in recent years. Case studies have noted development practices, limitations, and problems in the development of scientific software. However, applicability of the results of these studies to improving the wider scientific software development practices is not known. This paper presents a survey of 60 scientific software developers. The survey was conducted online from August-September 2009, and aims to identify where improvements to scientific software practices can be made. While our results generally confirm previous work, we have found some notable differences. The use of IDEs and version control tools among the surveyed scientific software developers has increased, and traceability of scientific software is not as important to scientific software developers as it is to scientific software users. Documentation also appears to be more widely produced than previous studies indicate. However, there remains room for improvement in tool use, documentation, testing, and verification activities for scientific software development

Published in Proceedings of the 2010 ACM-IEEE Internation Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement, 2010, ACM New York, NY, USA.

Full Paper (PDF via ACM Digital Library)

2009 - Survey of Practices in Scientific Software Development

This project has now been completed, and survey results are currently being processed. This project was designed to examine the current development practices in use by scientific software developers, and investigated what kinds of practices which are well-known in the software engineering area are currently in use in scientific software development and why these practices have been adopted.

Information Sheet (PDF).

2009 - Improving scientists' productivity using Domain-Specific Modeling

Luke Nguyen-Hoan, Shayne Flint, Ramesh Sankaranarayana

Abstract

Involvement in the production of software often reduces a scientist's productivity. While this has attracted the attention of software engineering researchers, much of the work to date has focused on improvement of the software itself, and has not investigated how the productivity of scientific research has or could be improved. The aim of the proposed research is to help scientists improve their productivity. This will be achieved by applying Domain-Specific Modeling (DSM) within the scientific software domain. We postulate that DSM will result in an improvement in the productivity of scientists through increased software development productivity, usability, transparency, reusability, and improved transfer of knowledge within the scientific community.

Published in Proceedings First APSEC2009 Workshop & Tutorial and Software Engineering Postgraduates Workshop (SEPoW2009), 2009, Universiti Malaysia Terengganu.

Full Paper (PDF)

Contact Details

Monitoring April 2010 Presentation