26.02.2026 IfI Colloquium: Beyond Lines of Code: Measuring Complex Developer Behavior at Google
Speaker:
Sarah D'Angelo, PhD, Senior UX Staff Researcher at Google
Date: Thursday, 26 February 2026, 17:15
Location: room BIN 2.A.01 at the Department of Informatics (IfI), Binzmühlestrasse 14, 8050 Zürich
Details about the format of the talk shall be checked always just ahead of a certain presentation date: (information here)
Abstract
Understanding what makes software developers happy and productive at work is critical to providing a great developer experience and effectively integrating AI into development workflows. At Google, we take a mixed methods approach to measuring and understanding developer experience by leveraging logs data from our tools, conducting interviews and surveys with developers, and building metrics that help us understand behavior at scale. In this talk, I’ll share our approaches to measuring and understanding complex behavior such as flow, trust, and creativity and discuss how software development is changing with AI.
Bio
Sarah D’Angelo is a Senior Staff User Experience Researcher at Google. Her research focuses on understanding and measuring developer experience and enabling new ways of working with AI. Prior to Google, she received her Ph.D. in Technology and Social Behavior from Northwestern University and her B.S. in Cognitive Science from UC San Diego.