Helping Developers Find Useful Tools

PLATO Lecture Series Spring, 2014 – Greeners on the Cutting Edge
Monday March 31, 1:30-3 pm, LH1

Emerson Murphy-Hill, Ph.D., Assistant Professor, North Carolina State University

Software developers have thousands of tools at their fingertips, but an individual developer will use only a small fraction of them. Some of the tools will be useless to the developer while others may be very useful, but a developer has only limited time to learn new tools. In this talk, Emerson will discuss the challenges that developers face in maintaining awareness of useful tools, as well as some solutions, including recommending commands that a developer is not using, but should be; giving a developer the benefits of a tool without having to know the tool exists; and connecting developers with peers who already use useful tools.

Emerson is an assistant professor at North Carolina State University. His research interests include the intersection between human-computer interaction and software engineering. In 2010, completed a post-doc with Gail Murphy at the University of British Columbia. He completed a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Portland State University in 2009 under Andrew P. Black. He holds a B.S. from the Evergreen State College.

Companion Reading:  Emerson Murphy-Hill, The Future of Social Learning in Software Engineering, IEEE Computer, January 2014, and Steven Brill, Code Red – Inside the … launch of HealthCare.gov…., Time Magazine, March 10, 2014, pp 26-36.