Human Aspects of Software Engineering 2023

• This course is an in-person class, attendance is expected (and required for the discussions).
• For the readings we will use Perusall. Make sure to create an account and sign up for the course specified in OLAT.
• The intro slides are online  Intro Slides.

Producing great software as fast as the market demands requires great, productive developers. Yet, what does it mean for an individual developer to be productive, and how can we best help developers to be productive? To answer these questions, researchers in software engineering have been, and are still predominantly looking at the output that software developers create, such as the applications, the source code, or the test cases. This output-oriented focus misses one of the most essential parts in the process of software development: the individual developer who creates the software.

Recent advances in technology afford the opportunity to collect a wide variety of detailed information on a software developer and her work, ranging from the number of resolved work items all the way to the cognitive load the developer experiences while working. The availability and accessibility of data on each developer is enabling us to explore questions about developer productivity in powerful new ways.

In this course, we investigate how we can ensure the human ingenuity and smarts are being amplified by the processes and tools used to create systems, rather than the humans spending precious cognitive effort dealing with mundane or unnecessary problems.

This is an overview of the kinds of topics we cover:

• quantitative and qualitative evaluation of SE research
• developer retrospection and productivity
• (biometric) sensing in software development
• work fragmentation and interruptions
• code navigation & exploration
• program comprehension
• software development tools and environments.

This module takes place in person, class attendance is expected. Materials are made available online.

In this course, you will be reading research papers, leading interactive paper discussion(s), critiquing papers, participating in peer reviews, and undertaking steps involved in a research project. The research project component will be flexible but likely involve activities such as identifying research questions, designing (and potentially developing) an approach or study to address these research questions, analyzing data, and writing up the steps. Depending on the class size, certain parts of the research project component may be completed in groups of up to three. The intent of the project is to get students to think about a research problem, identify a research question, investigate it, and write it up in a scientific manner.

Thomas Fritz (Instructor)

• Office: BIN 2.B.21
• Email: fritz@ifi.uzh.ch

Anastasia Ruvimova (Assistant)

• Office: BIN 2.B.17
• Email:  anastasia.ruvimova@uzh.ch

This course will be a project and paper-based course. The research project component is the primary component of the course; the outcome of all projects and/or project steps will be write-ups (similar to research papers or parts thereof). To pass this course, you must pass the research project component (obtain at least 50%) and must obtain a 50% overall mark that is based on the following:

• 65%: Project, including write-ups (e.g. proposal, final write-up and intermediate reports), presentation, continuous progress, and meetings; [35% final report; 15% final presentation; 15% proposal presentation and writeup]
• 35%: Readings, including active reading and collective annotations and discussions (Perusall), response papers, class participation, leading discussion (in-person class attendance is mandatory), and peer reviews of project reports. [15% weekly task assignments and class participation; 5% Perusall; 5% paper moderation; 10% peer reviews]

An undergraduate software engineering or human-computer interaction course and experience developing software as part of a team, as well as familiarity with issues in software engineering and with reading research papers would be helpful.