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

软件工程和编程语言研究的一个关键目标是创建软件工程师创建软件所需的新环境、工具、语言和技术。用直接证据来评估开发人员对工具或语言的预期价值，需要与开发人员一起进行用户研究。然而，希望进行这些研究的研究人员面临着许多重大障碍，包括招募参与者、管理任务和重复使用材料。因此，对软件工程工具和编程语言进行用户研究仍然很少。减少这些障碍可能会增加这些研究的频率，增加工具和语言的能力，以支持开发人员，并使开发人员在他们的工作中更富有成效和更有效。该项目包括规划活动，以构建用于进行开发人员用户研究的共享社区基础设施。将进行规划活动，以收集社区的投入，以便更好地了解问题的性质，并就未来进行研究的社区基础设施可能减少研究人员面临的障碍的方式获得反馈。将获得关于解决关键障碍的潜在可配置组件的社区反馈。将对软件工程和编程语言研究人员进行调查和访谈，以了解研究人员面临的障碍以及基础设施如何减少这些障碍。一个讲习班将促进最佳实践的交流，一个工作组将与在用户研究方面有经验的研究人员探讨基础设施的详细设计。最后，一项总结性调查将评估潜在基础设施支持研究人员进行研究的能力。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

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.