In this workshop, we wish to gather researchers and practitioners studying programmers to learn more about the current state of research amidst a pandemic, global economic crisis, and social unrest. Our intention is to examine and discuss strategies adopted, lessons learnt, and brainstorm if/how research about programmers may have shifted.

Important dates

• Submission deadline: April 12, 2021

• Notification acceptance: May 10, 2021

• Workshop day: June 7, 2021

Background

Government-mandated lockdowns, global economic crises, and several other events have influenced a shift to an unconventional work setting, affecting the wellbeing and productivity of developers (e.g., software engineers, data scientists, analysts, etc.) and researchers who study them. The world has switched to working from home, with an increased demand for supporting new technology innovations to keep the world functioning. Researchers studying developers focus on understanding developers’ work practices, their perceived usability of programming language(s) and tool(s), their usage of collaborative tools, their learning approaches adopted to support programming, etc. (e.g., Al-Ani et al., 2008; Bird et al., 2009; Bjørn et al., 2014; Carter et al., 2015; Gupta et al., 2009; Gutwin et al., 2002; Myers et al., 2016; Tang et al., 2011; Wang et al., 2020). As such, a research study about developers would normally include both in-person and remote observations of developer behavior, oftentimes also including the capture of developers’ perceptions and needs, using techniques such as surveying, semi-structured interviews, etc. A global shift to work from home has essentially pushed researchers to adopt methodologies that can primarily support remotely capturing research insights. For instance, observation of developers’ workflow and collaborations are challenging as in-person and field research are prohibited in most situations. Remote research can be seen as an opportunity to scale research to regions that might have been difficult to achieve with in-person user research, but it can introduce planning and facilitation issues. For instance, setting up a programming environment with experimental tools that are early in development may not necessarily be publicly available, thus making the study setup cumbersome.

An emergent theme on remote work by developers alludes to the insight that working from home while being quarantined during a pandemic is not the same as remote work (Bao et al., 2020; Bezzera et al., 2020; da Camara et al., 2020; Ford et al., 2020; Ganguly et al., 2020; Ralph et al., 2020; Machado et al., 2020; Miller et al., 2021; Moster et al., 2021; Oz & Crooks, 2020; Rodeghero et al., 2020). This insight provokes the question on how the series of world events has influenced developer’s work practices, research about developers, their approaches, and the questions/problems that are being addressed in this new world. The aim of this workshop is to bring together researchers from academia and industry to discuss the current state of research about developers, strategies applied, successes and failures in the form of “lessons learnt,” and new practices and processes adopted by developers in the field in a world that is plagued by human and economic disasters. We hope to create a forum for researchers to collaboratively brainstorm and generate a list of (i) new research questions/problems that are being addressed, and (ii) best practices and strategies that can be added to what is already known for effectively planning and executing research on distributed work amidst and in the post-pandemic world.

Workshop Goals

This workshop aims to bring together researchers who study developers to examine, and discuss the current state of research about developers. Specifically, we have the following goals in the context of global crises:

• Identify the approaches researchers adopted for understanding and measuring developer needs, wellbeing, collaboration, and productivity.

• Reflect on how current practices for team bonding, coordination and collaboration have changed, and how the new practices have influenced and transformed research methodologies in the new, unconventional work settings.

• Provide inspiration from cross-geographical perspectives by sharing experiences, resources, and strategies researchers have adopted.

• Leverage discussions from the workshop to generate a list of (i) new observations made in developer practices, consequently leading to shifts in research problems of interest, and (ii) known best practices/strategies for planning and executing research about developers both during and post global crisis.

We believe our discussions will result in deeper understanding of strategies and techniques researchers can adopt, not only to lower burdens in their work but also to become aware of emerging research techniques from a global perspective to support their work.

Participate

We invite researchers from academia and industry pursuing research about developers to submit original contributions on the problem they were attempting to learn, the research methodology that was adopted, and the results discovered about how developer practices and processes have changed. This includes researchers studying work practices in programming environments, programming language design, API usability, usability of programming tools, onboarding of new developers into remote teams, etc. We specifically encourage participants to reflect on the importance of the research questions addressed in their research and lessons learnt from the methodology adopted.

The manuscripts should not be anonymized and will be reviewed by members of the program committee. Submissions will be selected based on their relevance to the workshop goals.

At least one author of accepted manuscripts will be required to register and attend the workshop. Manuscripts will be made available to attendees in advance of the workshop. All attendees are expected to have read the papers to be able to actively engage in group discussions.

Workshop Activities

Pre-workshop: The accepted papers will be circulated to prepare the attendees for discussions at the workshop. Beyond the themes highlighted here by the workshop organizers, other themes for the workshop emerging from the position papers will be posted on the website. All authors of accepted manuscript(s) will be required to attend the workshop. All attendees are expected to have read the selected manuscripts to be able to actively engage in group discussions.

During workshop: This 3-hour workshop is divided into two sessions --

• In the first half of the workshop, author(s) of selected manuscripts will share a 10-minute presentation.

• The second half of the workshop will consist of a group discussions where the topics of the workshop are further explored with the intent of generating a curated list of research questions addressed and corresponding strategies/techniques researchers have adopted during pandemic.

Post-workshop: We plan to compile selected manuscripts and summarize discussions during the workshop for a special issue in the CSCW journal.

Workshop Organizers

Preethi Srinivas has been a User Experience Researcher at Google since 2018. Her work focuses on understanding and supporting the needs of mobile application developers. Her research interests lie at the intersection of software developer experience, programming environments, API usability, computer supported cooperative work, mobile computing, and ubiquitous computing.

Brad A. Myers is a Professor in the Human-Computer Interaction Institute in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, and has been researching programmers and programming for over 40 years. He was chosen to receive the ACM SIGCHI Lifetime Achievement Award in Research in 2017, for outstanding fundamental and influential research contributions to the study of human-computer interaction. He is an IEEE Fellow, ACM Fellow, member of the CHI Academy, and winner of 16 Best Paper type awards and 5 Most Influential Paper Awards. He has been a consultant on user interface design and implementation to over 90 companies, and regularly teaches courses on user interface design and software. His research interests include user interfaces, programming environments, programming language design, end-user software engineering (EUSE), API usability, developer experience (DevX or DX), interaction techniques, programming by example, mobile computing, and visual programming.

Youyang Hou has been a User Experience Researcher at Google since 2017. Her work focuses on developer experience and developer tools in mobile development and cloud computing services. Her research interests include computer supported collaborative work, developer experience, IDE experience, creative computing, and hackathons. She obtained her PhD in Human Computer Interaction from the School of Information, University of Michigan.

Program Committee

Steven Clarke (Microsoft)

Michael Coblenz (University of Maryland)

Youyang Hou (Google)

Shriram Krishnamurthy (Brown University)

Andrew Macvean (Google)

Brad A. Myers (Carengie Mellon University)

Steve Oney (University of Michigan)

Fabio Paterno (Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche)

Elli Ponomareva (JetBrains)

Martin P. Robillard (McGill University)

Preethi Srinivas (Google)

Chamila Wiyayarathna (University of Adelaide)

References

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• Bao, L., Li, T., Xia, X., Zhu, K., Li, H., & Yang, X. (2020). How does Working from Home Affect Developer Productivity?--A Case Study of Baidu During COVID-19 Pandemic. arXiv preprint arXiv:2005.13167.

• Bezerra, C. I., de Souza Filho, J. C., Coutinho, E. F., Gama, A., Ferreira, A. L., de Andrade, G. L., & Feitosa, C. E. (2020, October). How Human and Organizational Factors Influence Software Teams Productivity in COVID-19 Pandemic: A Brazilian Survey. In Proceedings of the 34th Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering (pp. 606-615).

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