CHOOSE Forum 2009
Andrew Ko - Where user experience and software engineering meet
Time: 11:20 am - 12:05 pm
About Andrew Ko
Andrew Ko is an Assistant Professor at the Information School at the University of Washington. His research interests include human and cooperative aspects of software engineering, end user software engineering, end-user programming, user interface software and technology, and programming language design. He has published articles in all of these areas, receiving best paper awards at top conferences such as the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) and the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing (CHI), as well as extensive press on the Whyline, a novel debugging tool that supports questions about program output. In 2004, he was also awarded both NSF and NDSEG research fellowships in support of his Ph.D. research. He received his Ph.D at the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon University, advised by Brad Myers. He received Honors Bachelors of Science degrees in Computer Science and Psychology from Oregon State University in 2002.
Talk abstract
Most software research focuses on either the lives of developers or the lives of users. In my research, I try to focus on where users’ and developers’ lives intersect, studying the challenges that users have in communicating problems to software companies, and the challenges that developers have in making sense of users’ experiences. In this talk, I will survey my research on these topics, describing some of the problems and trends I have discovered and some of the technologies I have invented to address these problems. These include a variety of studies of corporate software development, and several new tools that make it easier to debug and diagnose problems with software.