Margaret-Anne Storey

Publish or Perish: Questioning the Impact of Our Research on the Software Developer How often do we pause to consider how we, as a community, decide which developer problems we address, or how well we are doing at evaluating our solutions within real development contexts? Many of our research contributions in software engineering can be considered as purely technical. Yet somewhere, at some time, a software developer may be impacted by our research. In this talk, I invite the community to question the impact of our research on software developer productivity. To guide the discussion, I first paint a picture of the modern-day developer and the challenges they experience. I then present 4+1 views of software engineering research --- views that concern research context, method choice, research paradigms, theoretical knowledge and real-world impact. I demonstrate how these views can be used to design, communicate and distinguish individual studies, but also how they can be used to compose a critical perspective of our research at a community level. To conclude, I propose structural changes to our collective research and publishing activities --- changes to provoke a more expeditious consideration of the many challenges facing today's software developer.

Dr. Margaret-Anne Storey is a Professor of Computer Science and the Co-Director of the Matrix Institute for Applied Data Science at the University of Victoria. She holds a Canada Research Chair in Human and Social Aspects of Software Engineering and is a member of the Royal Society of Canada’s College of New Scholars, Artists and Scientists. She held the Lise Meitner Guest Professorship at Lund University in Sweden from 2016 to 2018, a professorship that promotes gender diversity in science. Together with her students and collaborators, she seeks to understand how software tools, communication media, data visualizations, and social theories can be leveraged to improve how software engineers and knowledge workers explore, understand, analyze and share complex information and knowledge. She has published widely on these topics and collaborates extensively with high-tech companies and non-profit organizations to ensure real-world applicability of her research contributions and tools. Over the past several years, she has collaborated with product teams and researchers at Microsoft to understand developer satisfaction and developer productivity, with the goal of improving their engineering systems and processes.