Supporting developer workflows

加拿大数字经济正在蓬勃发展，过去两年的就业增长速度是整体经济的4比1。软件开发是这一领域的重要组成部分。能够开发正确、可靠和可伸缩的软件对于所有现代系统来说都是至关重要的，无论它们的应用领域是什么。 不幸的是，软件开发很难。经验研究表明，开发人员在工作时必须执行各种复杂的任务。要成功完成这些任务，开发人员通常需要执行几个步骤，将许多不同的信息源组合在一起，并将多个工具和应用程序整合到复杂的工作流中。 大多数支持软件开发人员的研究主要集中在支持特定的开发活动，如编码、代码搜索或测试。令人惊讶的是，对于开发人员组合到复杂工作流中以完成日常更高级别的任务和目标的一系列步骤和活动，我们知之甚少。 通过更好地了解这些工作流程，我们的目标是通过支持开发人员更快、更高质量地完成任务，帮助他们为经济做出贡献。我们将通过与我们的行业合作伙伴进行广泛的实证研究来实现这一点，我们将使用这些研究来提出改进常见开发工作流程的新工具。我们将评估这些新工具在工业工作场所的效用，并最终希望这项工作将提供对开发人员如何工作的原则性理解，以便我们能够更好地支持他们执行复杂的技术工作流程。

The Canadian digital economy is booming and outpaces the overall economy 4 to 1 in job growth over the past two years. Software development comprises a crucial part of this sector. Being able to develop correct, reliable, and scalable software is critical for all modern systems, regardless of their intended domain of application. Unfortunately, software development is hard. Empirical studies have shown that developers have to perform a broad variety of complex tasks while they work. To successfully complete these tasks, developers often have to perform several steps, combine many disparate sources of information, and use multiple tools and applications into complex workflows. Most research supporting software developers predominantly focuses on supporting specific development activities, such as coding, code search, or testing. Surprisingly little is known about the overall series of steps and activities that developers combine into the complex workflows they have to perform to accomplish their higher level tasks and objectives on a day-to-day basis. By building a better understanding of these workflows, we aim to help developers contribute to the economy by supporting them in completing their tasks more quickly and with higher quality. We will do this through extensive empirical studies with our industrial partner which we will use to propose novel tools improving common develop workflows. We will evaluate the utility of these new tools in the industrial workplace and ultimately hope this work will provide a principled understanding for how developers work so we can better support them as they perform complex technical workflows.