CCRI: Planning: Collaborative Research: A Platform for Conducting Software Engineering User Studies

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A key goal of software engineering and programming languages research is to create new environments, tools, languages, and techniques through which software engineers create software. Evaluating claims with direct evidence about the expected value of a tool or language for developers requires conducting user studies with developers. Yet researchers looking to conduct these studies face a number of significant barriers, including recruiting participants, administering tasks, and reusing materials. As a result, conducting user studies of software engineering tools and programming languages remains infrequent. Reducing these barriers may increase the frequency of these studies, increasing the ability of tools and languages to support developers and enabling developers to be more productive and effective in their work.This project encompasses planning activities to construct a shared community infrastructure for conducting user studies of developers. Planning activities will be conducted to gather community input to better understand the nature of the problem and obtain feedback on ways in which a future community infrastructure for conducting studies might reduce the barriers researchers face. Community feedback will be obtained on potential configurable components addressing key barriers. A survey and interviews of software engineering and programming languages researchers will be conducted to understand the barriers researchers face and how infrastructure might reduce these barriers. A workshop will facilitate exchange of best practices, and a working group will explore the detailed design of the infrastructure with researchers experienced in user studies. Finally, a summative survey will assess the ability of potential infrastructure to support the studies researchers conduct.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.