More often than not, programming is collaborative. Whether this collaboration is implicit (such as referencing a post on StackOverflow) or explicit (such as merging into a multi-user codebase), effective communication tools can help programmers write better code. In this talk, I will describe work that our research group has done to (1) study how programmers communicate when working in teams and (2) build systems to improve communication between programmers. I will focus particularly on our work with data scientists and mixed-ability programming teams.
Steve Oney is an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan School of Information. His research focuses on enabling and encouraging more people to write and customize computer programs by creating new programming tools and exploring usability issues in programming environments. Steve completed his Ph.D in Carnegie Mellon’s Human-Computer Interaction Institute where he was advised by Professor Brad Myers and Dr. Joel Brandt. He also attended MIT (CS & math S.B. in 2007, CS M.Eng in 2008).