Software Engineering and Human-Computer Interaction

Overview

The Software Engineering and Human-Computer Interaction group is a multi-perspective group focusing on a single problem: how to help people develop software that is effective and accurate. The people we are trying to help range from professional programmers to end users who use special-purpose tools to create their own software.

The approaches we use in conducting this research range from automated behind-the-scenes reasoning about the software being created, to human-computer-interaction methods for targeting software tools to the needs of the human programmers using it, to formal methods of reasoning precisely about the properties of software being developed, to language design to create the right kind of language for the kind of task the software is trying to address.

Our work is collaborative, spanning across department boundaries and beyond, with collaborators at IBM, Microsoft, and numerous other industrial and university researchers involved. In some of our research thrusts, such as end-user software engineering, we are regarded as international leaders.

Sub Areas

• End-User Software Engineering
• Programming Tools, Environments, and Analysis
• Human Factors in Software Engineering
• Software Maintenance and Evolution