KHORA: Exploratory programming through augmented development environments

Software developers now have to explore and operate within an increasingly complex and constantly evolving design space, while having to deal with deploying new software releases faster. KHORA will develop a research activity in software engineering to help developers in mastering their increasingly complex design space. To do so, KHORA will develop new scientific theories, approaches, and techniques related to exploratory programming, a development mode to try out, compare, explore different versions of software artifacts. KHORA’s research agenda implies working on:

1. domain-specific IDEs and digital twins to help developers master their development design space through novel exploratory programming features (augmented development environment);
2. large-scale, polyglot, AI-based, code analysis techniques to underpin exploratory programming (augmented code analysis). The application domains of KHORA encompass software engineering with software artifacts (co-)evolution and optimization (e.g., reduce software energy consumption) and scientific computing to help scientists in their complex software development.

Research axes

Exploratory programming requires a research agenda that involves studying both HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) and software engineering research paths. KHORA’s research agenda thus implies working on:

• Axis 1 – Augmented development environment -- Domain-specific IDEs and digital twins to help developers master their development design space through novel exploratory programming features;
• Axis 2 – Augmented code analysis -- Large-scale, polyglot, AI-based, code analysis techniques to underpin exploratory pro-gramming. 

keyswords: software engineering ; software science ; exploratory programming ; developer experience ; development environment ; code analysis technique ; software artifacts (co-)evolution and optimization

Continuation team: DiverSE