Gail Murphy
University of British Columbia
Abstract:
The productivity of software developers is under constant attack due to a
continual inundation of information: source code is easier and easier to
traverse and to find, email inboxes are stuffed to capacity, RSS feeds and
tweets provide a continual stream of technology updates, and so on. To
enable software developers to work more effectively, tools are often
introduced that provide even more information. The effect of more and more
tools producing more and more information is placing developers into
overload. To combat this overload, we have been building approaches rooted
in structure and inspired by human memory models. As an example, the Mylyn
project packages and makes available the structure that emerges from how a
programmer works in an episodic-memory inspired interface. Programmers
working with Mylyn see only the information they need for a task and can
recall past task information with a simple click. We have shown in a field
study that Mylyn makes programmers more productive; the half a million
programmers now using Mylyn seem to agree. In this talk, I will describe the
overload faced by programmers today and discuss several approaches we have
developed to attack the problem, some of which may also pertain beyond the
domain of software development.
Biography:
Gail Murphy is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at the
University of British Columbia after receiving a B.Sc. from the University
of Alberta, an M.S. and Ph.D. from the University of Washington and working
for 5 years as a software developer. She works primarily on building simpler
and more effective tools to help developers manage software evolution tasks.
In 2005, she held a UBC Killam Research Fellowship and also received the
AITO Dahl-Nygaard Junior Prize for her work in software evolution. In 2006
she received an NSERC Steacie Fellowship and the CRA-W Anita Borg Early
Career Award. In 2007, she helped co-found Tasktop Technologies Inc. In
2008, she served as the program committee chair for the ACM SIGSOFT FSE
conference and received the University of Washington College of Engineering
Diamond Early Career Award. One of the most rewarding parts of her career
has been collaborating with many very talented graduate and undergraduate
students.
XXIV SBBD XXIII SBES - 05 a 09 de Outubro de 2009