Human-Oriented Software Engineering

Software developers continue to face considerable challenges designing, implementing, and maintaining software systems despite steady advances in software engineering (SE). The software engineering literature contains numerous tool designs that aim to help developers perform complex information-intensive tasks. Regardless of the particular problems these tools aim to solve, they often address fundamental questions like what information would help the developer most at a given moment? How to present that information to the developer? How to intervene without interfering? However, the tool creators generally lack a theoretical and principled basis for answering these questions, and instead, tend to make design decisions in an ad hoc manner, relying heavily on their intuitions. My research takes a human-oriented approach both to help software developers directly through improved tools as well as to help the creators of software engineering tools by providing foundational design guidance and methods. In particular, my work emphasizes the application of theories, principles, and methodologies from the areas of human-computer interaction and psychology to the problems of software engineering. Using this approach, my research has advanced understanding of information-seeking and sense-making behaviors of software developers, and provided principled and empirically grounded implications for the design of software engineering tools. In this research statement, I highlight my human-oriented research to date and outline my research agenda moving forward.