My research focuses on empirically studying software developers and on using personal and biometric data to improve software developers' productivity and well-being. By better understanding what software developers need, what they experience, and how they operate on a daily basis, we will be able to provide better and more tailored support to developers as well as improve their productivity and the quality of the software they produce. In particular, I'm interested in:
- Developer Productivity / Personal Analytics: understanding software developers' perceptions of productivity, providing a meaningful retrospection and fostering productive behavior in software developers.
Selected publications in this area are: "Reducing Interruptions at Work: A Large-Scale Field Study of FlowLight" (Züger, Corley, Meyer, Li, Fritz, Shepherd, Augustine, Francis, Kraft, Snipes, CHI'17), "The Work Life of Developers: Activities, Switches and Perceived Productivity." (Meyer, Barton, Murphy, Zimmermann, Fritz. TSE 2017), and "Persuasive Technology in the Real World: A Study of Long-Term Use of Activity Sensing Devices for Fitness." (Fritz, Huang, Murphy, Zimmermann. CHI'14).
- Biometric Sensing: exploring the potential of biometric (aka. psycho-physiological) sensors to measure the difficulty, emotions, and interruptibility developers experience while working, and using these measures to provide better support, such as, by intervening before a developer create a bug or the developer's productivity is impeded.
Selected publications in this area are: "Using (Bio)Metrics to Predict Code Quality Online." (Müller, Fritz. ICSE'16), "Sensing Interruptibility in the Office: A Field Study on the Use of Biometric and Computer Interaction Sensors." (Züger, Müller, Meyer, Fritz. CHI'18), and "Stuck and Frustrated or In Flow and Happy: Sensing Developers’ Emotions and Progress." (Müller and Fritz. ICSE'14).
- Information Needs: empirically studying developers’ information needs, and devising developer-centric models that provide easy access to the relevant project information.
Selected publications in this area are: "Tracing Software Developers’ Eyes and Interactions for Change Tasks." (Kevic, Walters, Shaffer, Sharif, Fritz, Shepherd. FSE'15), "The Making of Cloud Applications – An Empirical Study on Software Development for the Cloud." (Cito, Leitner, Fritz, Gall. FSE'15), and "Developers’ Code Context Models for Change Tasks." (Fritz, Shepherd, Kevic, Snipes and Bräunlich. FSE'14).
Working with great students is one of the best parts of my job. I'm currently working with
and mentored and graduated several great students, including (in no particular order)
- @UZH: PhD students André Meyer(Postdoc and Okomo), Katja Kevic(Microsoft), Manuela Züger (IPT), Sebastian Müller (Zühlke), and MSc students including Catrin Loch, Christoph Bräunlich, Claudia Vogel, Raphael Rosenast, Yves Bilgerig, and Annatina Vinzenz.
- @UBC: Jan Pilzer (Microsoft), and Anna Scholz (Mozilla).
My research is funded by