Grant: Collaborative Research and Development Grants

The Canadian digital economy is booming and outpaces the overall economy 4 to 1 in job growth over the past two years. Software development comprises a crucial part of this sector. Being able to develop correct, reliable, and scalable software is critical for all modern systems, regardless of their intended domain of application.Unfortunately, software development is hard. Empirical studies have shown that developers have to perform a broad variety of complex tasks while they work. To successfully complete these tasks, developers often have to perform several steps, combine many disparate sources of information, and use multiple tools and applications into complex workflows.Most research supporting software developers predominantly focuses on supporting specific development activities, such as coding, code search, or testing. Surprisingly little is known about the overall series of steps and activities that developers combine into the complex workflows they have to perform to accomplish their higher level tasks and objectives on a day-to-day basis.By building a better understanding of these workflows, we aim to help developers contribute to the economy by supporting them in completing their tasks more quickly and with higher quality. We will do this through extensive empirical studies with our industrial partner which we will use to propose novel tools improving common develop workflows. We will evaluate the utility of these new tools in the industrial workplace and ultimately hope this work will provide a principled understanding for how developers work so we can better support them as they perform complex technical workflows.