Enabling Powerful Software Insights by Visualizing Friction and Flow

In an Agile software development process, a software team will typically meet on a regular basis in a “retrospective meeting” to reflect on the challenges faced by the team and opportunities for improvement. On the surface, this challenge might seem straight-forward, but modern software projects are complex endeavors, and developers are human – identifying what’s most important in a complex sociotechnical system is a task humans struggle to do well. What if developers had tools that recorded and helped them explore their historical experiences with the code, and they could identify hotspots of team friction, worthy of discussion, based on empirical data? This talk will explore the possibility and impact of such tools through a design fiction and working prototype of an Augmented Reality (AR) Code Planetarium powered by FlowInsight developer tools.

Arty Starr, PhD student, University of Victoria & Founder, FlowInsight

Arty is a recognized Flow Experience expert, researcher, speaker and thought leader, and the author of Idea Flow. This expertise, along with her experience as a former CTO and software engineer inspired Arty’s mission to improve the efficiency and morale of engineering teams, culminating in her founding FlowInsight.

Arty teaches system models for better understanding the Flow Experience of software development, and the practice of using Flow Metrics to systematically optimize programming flow. “Flow as a practice” is the art of getting in and staying in flow state to optimize productivity.

The company she founded, FlowInsight, is on a mission to bring back joy to our everyday work.