Why Don’t Software Developers Use their Tools?

February 8, 2011
Emerson Murphy-Hill | North Carolina State University

An abundance of tools have been created to help software developers do their jobs, from testing frameworks, to refactoring tools, to entire integrated development environments. Unfortunately, an individual software engineer will use very few of the tools available to him, even though this underuse may damage his personal productivity, the quality of his software, and the success of his organization. In this talk, I discuss several reasons why this is the case, including poor usability of existing tools, the inability of developers to stay abreast of useful tools, and the effect of human aging on tool awareness. I also discuss my work in addressing these challenges and proposals for addressing them in the future.

Speaker Details

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, he 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. You can find his webpage at: http://people.engr.ncsu.edu/ermurph3/.