Current Projects
Good documentation has long been argued to be the key to helping developers work more quickly and consistently with design decisions. But our studies have found that documentation is left largely disconnected from code, making it hard to write and update and causing it to become out of date and untrusted. This leaves developers to instead reverse engineer design decisions...
As developers debug, they use their mental models to formulate hypotheses about the cause of a defect. Unfortunately, when their hypotheses are wrong, developers can waste time and get stuck gathering information that does not lead them any closer to the cause of the defect. We've conducted studies to understand how developers debug and the role of hypotheses in debugging...
When working in large and complex codebases, developers face challenges using Find Usages to understand how to reuse classes and methods. To better understand these challenges, we conducted a small exploratory study with 4 participants. We found that developers often wasted time reading long lists of similar usages or prematurely focused on a single usage. Based on these findings, we...
Onboarding on a new project is often a long, hard process, dissuading casual contributors from ever starting. What if you could contribute code to a new software project in a few minutes? How would enabling many transient contributors change software development? We've been exploring these questions through building web-based programming environments which enable microtask programming and conducting studies to understand...
Developers solve problems by applying programming strategies, describing sequences of steps to debug, reuse, design, test, and understand code. Experienced developers work better by using more effective strategies. We've been exploring ways to capture and make explicit the strategies developers use, helping uncover how developers work differently and to create new ways to help developers benefit from the hard-earned wisdom...
