Eirini Kalliamvakou

Albert Ziegler, Eirini Kalliamvakou, Shawn Simister et al.

Neural code synthesis has reached a point where snippet generation is accurate enough to be considered for integration into human software development workflows. Commercial products aim to increase programmers' productivity, without being able to measure it directly. In this case study, we asked users of GitHub Copilot about its impact on their productivity, and sought to find a reflection of their perception in directly measurable user data. We find that the rate with which shown suggestions are accepted, rather than more specific metrics regarding the persistence of completions in the code over time, drives developers' perception of productivity.

Margaret-Anne Storey, Neil A. Ernst, Courtney Williams et al.

Software engineering is a socio-technical endeavor, and while many of our contributions focus on technical aspects, human stakeholders such as software developers are directly affected by and can benefit from our research and tool innovations. In this paper, we question how much of our research addresses human and social issues, and explore how much we study human and social aspects in our research designs. To answer these questions, we developed a socio-technical research framework to capture the main beneficiary of a research study (the who), the main type of research contribution produced (the what), and the research strategies used in the study (how we methodologically approach delivering relevant results given the who and what of our studies). We used this Who-What-How framework to analyze 151 papers from two well-cited publishing venues---the main technical track at the International Conference on Software Engineering, and the Empirical Software Engineering Journal by Springer---to assess how much this published research explicitly considers human aspects. We find that although a majority of these papers claim the contained research should benefit human stakeholders, most focus on technical contributions without engaging humans in their studies. Although our analysis is scoped to two venues, our results suggest a need for more diversification and triangulation of research strategies. In particular, there is a need for strategies that aim at a deeper understanding of human and social aspects of software development practice to balance the design and evaluation of technical innovations. We recommend that the framework should be used in the design of future studies in order to nudge software engineering research towards explicitly including human and social concerns in their designs, and to improve the relevance of our research for human stakeholders.