Current Projects

My research group is involved in an ever-evolving set of projects, with some of the more recent ones featured here. To read more about my work, current or past, you can find the full list of publications on my Google Scholar page.

Creativity in Software Development

Together with our collaborator Prof. Rafael Priknadlicki, we are studying the role of creativity in software development, with a particular eye toward understanding how developers perceive creativity, what value it brings to the software development process, and how it can be supported through novel tools.

Lead graduate student: Vicki Jackson

Recent papers: "Creativity, Generative AI, and Software Development: A Research Agenda", "Team Creativity in a Hybrid Software Development World: Eight Approaches"

An image of four workers, one of whom is directing the others, all on a crosswalk to depict work being done.

Daily Smirk

We are developing a new peer assessment tool for use by instructors in team-based course projects. The tool distinguishes itself by using lightweight, high-frequency peer assessment together with a comprehensive dashboard so instructors can continuously monitor teams throughout a project.

Lead graduate student: Yu Lu

Recent papers: "The Daily Smirk: A Preliminary Prototype for Continuous Peer Assessment of Team-based Projects"

A screenshot of the Daily Smirk tool, showing several teams with a color bar depicting good peer assessments in green and bad ones in red.

TeamCAST

We are developing a new tool for visualizing progress and contributions in student team projects. The tool provides instructors with a dashboard that displays all intermediate artifacts that student teams produce over the course of a project, so the instructors can gauge progress, timeliness, and the overall process being following by each team.

Lead graduate student: Anmol Deshpande (graduated, now at The Trade Desk)

Software Design and Generative AI

Together with our collaborator Prof. Rafael Priknadlicki at Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio Grande do Sul, we are studying how generative AI is impacting software development, as well as how generative AI can be leveraged in creating new software design tools.

Lead graduate students: Guilherme Pereira (primary advisor Rafael Priknadlicki) and Vicki Jackson

Recent papers: "Early Results from a Study of GenAI Adoption in a Large Brazilian Company: The Case of Globo"

Two concetric circles, one representing ChatGPT, the other Copilot, and how each is seen by our interviewees in terms of concerns and how they fit in development.

Software Maintenance Meetings

Together with our collaborator Prof. Janet Burge at Colorado College, we are studying software maintenance meetings: regularly scheduled meetings during which a team addresses ongoing maintenance issues with a deployed system. We are especially studying how information is shared and captured, assessing the quality of automatically generated meeting summaries, and developing new tools in support of these kinds of meetings.

Lead graduate students: Leyu Lyu and Adriana Meza Soria (graduated, now at IBM)

Recent papers: "Characterizing Software Maintenance Meetings: Information Shared, Discussion Outcomes, and Information Captured", " Recurring Distributed Software Maintenance Meetings: Toward an Initial Understanding"

A video still showing a distributed maintenance meeting on WebEx, with the meeting participants blurred at the top for anonymity and below a Confluence page that captures their discussion.

Software Developer Wellbeing

Together with UCI faculty Iftekhar Ahmed, Madhu Reddy, and Stephen Schueller, we are studying the mental wellbeing of software developers. We are particularly interested in understanding how developers perceive their wellbeing and its importance to their work, what work factors impact their wellbeing, and how we can design new software tools that put less stress on developers' wellbeing.

Lead graduate students: Bruna Oewel, Novia Wong, and Nai-Yu Cheng (all with primary advisor Madhu Reddy)

Recent papers: "Mental wellbeing at work: Perspectives of software engineers"

A graph from the paper on developer wellbeing referenced above the image; the graph shows individual, team, and organizational factors impacting mental wellbeing.

Blind and Low-Vision Software Developers

Together with UCI faculty Stacy Branham and our collaborator Prof. Rafael Priknadlicki, we are studying the obstacles experienced by and opportunities for blind and low vision software developers to participate as professionals in the software industry. Among other topics, our studies are addressing meetings, home-grown tools, and generative AI.

Lead graduate students: Yoonha Cha (primary advisor Stacy Branham)

Recent papers: "Understanding the Career Mobility of Blind and Low Vision
Software Professionals", "“Do You Want Me to Participate or Not?”: Investigating the Accessibility of Software Development Meetings for Blind and Low Vision Professionals"

An AI generated image of hands on a braille keyword.

Environmental Sustainability Education

Together with UCI faculty Bill Tomlinson, Rebecca Black, and Julie Ferguson we are developing novel approaches for educating students in environmental sustainability. We particularly are exploring tools through which students of different majors can relate course content to their own knowledge base and experiences.

Lead graduate student: Hayden Freedman (primary advisor Bill Tomlinson)

Recent papers: "Construction and Analysis of Collaborative Educational Networks based on Student Concept Maps", "Improving Wikidata with Student-Generated Concept Maps"

A personalized concept map generated by a student in one of the courses in which a new tool for sustainability education was tried out.