Abstract
Live Programming is an idea pioneered by programming environments from the earliest days of computing, such as those for Lisp and Smalltalk. One thing they had in common is liveness: an always accessible evaluation and nearly instantaneous feedback, usually focused on coding activities. In this paper, we argue for Live Software Development (LiveSD), bringing liveness to software development activities beyond coding, to make software easier to visualize, simpler to understand, and faster to evolve. Multiple challenges may vary with the activity and application domain. Research on this topic needs to consider the more important liveness gaps in software development, which representations and abstractions better support developers, and which tools are needed to support it. © 2019 Association for Computing Machinery.

Abstract
Every year, thousands of new students begin their Masters in STEM related topics. Despite being regarded as a common occurrence by the faculty, it represents the culmination of years of studying and preparation for their professional life. Notwithstanding, these students face well-known recurrent problems: how to choose a topic, how to choose an advisor, how to start researching, and how to deal with all the unknowns associated with academic research. Although there are several books on how to write a thesis, most of them avoid prescriptive recommendations on topics beyond research per se or focus on doctoral students, for which the duration and motivation are significantly different. In this paper, we draft a pattern language comprised of thirty patterns that we have observed from supervising over a hundred masters students within the last decade.

Abstract
As with every software, Internet-of-Things (IoT) systems have their own life-cycle, from conception to construction, deployment, and operation. However, the testing requirements from these systems are slightly different due to their inherent coupling with hardware and human factors. Hence, the procedure of delivering new software versions in a continuous integration/delivery fashion must be adopted. Based on existent solutions (and inspired in other closely-related domains), we describe two common strategies that developers can use for testing IoT systems, (1) Testbed and (2) Simulation-based Testing, as well as one recurrent solution for its deployment (3) Middleman Update.

Abstract
Cloud computing has been playing a significant role in the provisioning of services over the Internet since its birth. However, developers still face several challenges limiting its full potential. The difficulties are mostly due to the large, ever-growing, and ever-changing catalog of services offered by cloud providers. As a consequence, developers must deal with different cloud services in their systems; each managed almost individually and continually growing in complexity. This heterogeneity may limit the view developers have over their system architectures and make the task of managing these resources more complex. This work explores the use of liveness as a way to shorten the feedback loop between developers and their systems in an interactive and immersive way, as they develop and integrate cloud-based systems. The designed approach allows real-time visualization of cloud infrastructures using a visual city metaphor. To assert the viability of this approach, the authors conceived a proof-of-concept and carried on experiments with developers to assess its feasibility.

Abstract
Successful software systems tend to grow considerably, ending up suffering from essential complexity, and very hard to understand as a whole. Software visualization techniques have been explored as one approach to ease software understanding. This work presents a novel approach and environment for software development that explores the use of liveness and virtual reality (VR) as a way to shorten the feedback loop between developers and their software systems in an interactive and immersive way. As a proof-of-concept, the authors developed a prototype that uses a visual city metaphor and allows developers to visit and dive into the system, in a live way. To assess the usability and viability of the approach, the authors carried on experiments to evaluate the effectiveness of the approach, and how to best support a live approach for software development.

Abstract
Internet-of-Things systems are comprised of highly heterogeneous architectures, where different protocols, application stacks, integration services, and orchestration engines co-exist. As they permeate our everyday lives, more of them become safety-critical, increasing the need for making them testable and fault-tolerant, with minimal human intervention. In this paper, we present a set of self-healing extensions for Node-RED, a popular visual programming solution for IoT systems. These extensions add runtime verification mechanisms and self-healing capabilities via new reusable nodes, some of them leveraging meta-programming techniques. With them, we were able to implement self-modification of flows, empowering the system with self-monitoring and self-testing capabilities, that search for malfunctions, and take subsequent actions towards the maintenance of health and recovery. We tested these mechanisms on a set of scenarios using a live physical setup that we called SmartLab. Our results indicate that this approach can improve a system’s reliability and dependability, both by being able to detect failing conditions, as well as reacting to them by self-modifying flows, or triggering countermeasures. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020.