Evaluating Impact of Experience in Architectural Design DecisionMaking Techniques: An Experimental Study The software engineering literature describes several decisionmaking techniques for architectural design. However, the impact of the experience of those who use these techniques on their efficacy has been little explored. This article addresses this research gap through an experimental study to evaluate the impact of experience of software architecture decisionmaking team members on the efficacy of TaSPeR (Tactics Selection Poker), a software architecture tactics selection technique based on Planning Poker. A set of 24 IT professional developers was divided into two xe2x80x9cexpertxe2x80x9d teams and two xe2x80x9cnovicexe2x80x9d teams (of six people each); each team had to solve two scenarios, one using TaSPeR and one using an adhoc technique; the scenarios were crossed to mitigate possible learning effects. The study compared the effectiveness of teams in terms of precision, recall, and accuracy (of selected tactics versus a ground truth); accuracy was found best. Initial results suggest that TaSPeR improves the accuracy of novice teams but hurts the accuracy of expert teams. This result is quite unexpected and begs replication with even larger populations of IT professionals (no easy task). If the results are confirmed, the question that will rise is: if consensus techniques are so good to estimate, why would they hurt design decisionmaking by expert teams?

Live Software Development Environment Using Virtual Reality: A Prototype and Experiment 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 proofofconcept, 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.