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Scott A. Venckus

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Publications by Scott A. Venckus (bibliography)

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1996
 
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Zanden, Brad Vander and Venckus, Scott A. (1996): An Empirical Study of Constraint Usage in Graphical Applications. In: Kurlander, David, Brown, Marc and Rao, Ramana (eds.) Proceedings of the 9th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology November 06 - 08, 1996, Seattle, Washington, United States. pp. 137-146.

One-way constraints have been widely incorporated in research toolkits for constructing graphical applications. However, although a number of studies have examined the performance of these toolkits' constraint satisfaction algorithms, there have not been any empirical studies that have examined how programmers use constraints in actual applications. This paper reports the results of a study intended to address these matters. Seven graphical applications were chosen for their diversity and profiling information was gathered about their use of constraints. The data reveal that constraint networks tend to be modular, that is, divided into a number of small, independent sets of constraints rather than one monolithic set of constraints. This finding suggests that constraint satisfaction algorithms should be able to resatisfy constraints rapidly after a change to one or more variables. It also suggests that debugging constraints should not be unduly burdensome on a programmer since the number of constraints that must be examined to find the source of an error is not terribly large. Overall, the results of this study should provide a repository of data that will be useful in directing future research on optimizing constraint solvers and developing effective debugging techniques.

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26 Feb 2010: Modified
28 Apr 2003: Added

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May 25

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.

-- Alfred North Whitehead

 
 

Featured chapter

Read the fascinating history of Wearable Computing, told by its father, Steve Mann

Read Steve's chapter !

 
 

Help us help you!