•   When: Wednesday, May 04, 2016 from 01:00 PM to 02:00 PM
•   Speakers: Thomas LaToza
•   Location: Nguyen Engineering, Room 4201
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Abstract

How is it that humans interact with code? What dominates developers' time programming, and how might future software engineering environments make developers more productive? In this talk, I’ll first present some results from a number of studies investigating such questions, based on interviews, surveys, and observations of software developers at work. These studies suggest that programming is driven by the search for information and the ways in which environments, programming languages, and developers own choices influence the time and difficulty of obtaining information. I’ll conclude by examining the prospects for a more unified theory of programming interactions, positing information minimalism and feedback as the primary mechanisms by which environments, languages, and practices help developers achieve higher productivity and offering a framework for assessing the value of widely varied approaches.

Speaker's Bio

Thomas LaToza is an Assistant Professor of Computer Science in the Volgenau School of Engineering at George Mason University. He works at the intersection of software engineering and human-computer interaction, investigating how humans interact with code and designing new ways to build software. He currently serves as guest editor of the IEEE Software Theme Issue on Crowdsourcing for Software Engineering, serves as co-chair of the Seventh Workshop on the Evaluation and Usability of Programming Languages and Tools, and serves as co-chair of the Third International Workshop on Crowdsourcing in Software Engineering. His work is funded in part through a $1.4M grant from the National Science Foundation on Crowd Programming. He holds B.S. degrees in psychology and computer science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and a Ph.D. in software engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. http://cs.gmu.edu/~tlatoza/