To make a prairie it takes a clover and one bee,—
One clover, and a bee,
And revery.
The revery alone will do
If bees are few.
— Emily Dickinson, 1830-1886
Over the years, my research projects have spanned user interfaces, software engineering and type theory, but they all share a common goal: to make it easier to produce usable, reliable software. When you observe the work practice of an experienced professional, like a surgeon or a car mechanic, you see efficient, graceful use of task-appropriate tools. In contrast, if you watch an experienced software developer doing an every-day task, you see fumbling, confusion and frustration. Software developers are every bit as trained and talented, but their tools and processes are often poorly suited for their tasks.
My group at Microsoft Research, Human Interactions in Programming (HIP), applies user-centered design to software development: studying developers both in the lab and in the field; understanding what is difficult about their typical tasks; building new tools to make those tasks easier; and evaluating those tools with developers. My recent research studies recommender systems for team newcomers, the use of spatial memory to navigate large code bases, retaining knowledge in long-lived projects, and patterns of communication and interruption in co-located and geographically distributed development teams.
Curriculum Vitae (including complete publication list)
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- Robert DeLine, Making CHASE Mainstream (Keynote at CHASE Workshop), 17 May 2009
- Andrew Begel and Robert DeLine, Codebook: Social Networking over Code, in Proceedings of ICSE 09 (New Ideas and Emerging Results), Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., June 2009
- Paula M. Bach, Robert DeLine, and John M. Carroll, Designers wanted: participation and the user experience in open source software development, in Proceedings of CHI 09, Association for Computing Machinery, Inc., 2009
- Mauro Cherubini, Gina Venolia, and Rob DeLine, Building an Ecologically-valid, Large-scale Diagram to Help Developers Stay Oriented in Their Code, in VLHCC '07: Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing, IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, USA, September 2007
- Mauro Cherubini, Gina Venolia, Rob DeLine, and Andrew J. Ko, Let's go to the whiteboard: how and why software developers use drawings, in CHI '07: Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, ACM, New York, NY, USA, May 2007
- Andrew J. Ko, Robert DeLine, and Gina Venolia, Information Needs in Collocated Software Development Teams, in ICSE '07: Proceedings of the 29th international conference on Software Engineering, IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, USA, May 2007
- Robert DeLine, Mary Czerwinski, Brian Meyers, Gina Venolia, Steven Drucker, and George Robertson, Code Thumbnails: Using Spatial Memory to Navigate Source Code, in VLHCC '06: Proceedings of the Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing, IEEE Computer Society, Washington, DC, USA, September 2006
- Thomas D. LaToza, Gina Venolia, and Robert DeLine, Maintaining mental models: a study of developer work habits, in ICSE '06: Proceedings of the 28th international conference on Software engineering, ACM, New York, NY, USA, May 2006
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