Speaker: Ohad Barzilay

Title: Embedding: On the Diversity of Example Usage in Professional Software Development

Abstract:
In my PhD work I investigated example usage among professional software developers. Many benefits reside in systematic and habitual example usage both for software companies as well as for individuals. These benefits include: productivity increase, improvement of code quality, enforcement of consistency of both design and coding standards, and the establishment of an effective knowledge transfer mechanism inside the organization and outside of it. Though these benefits may be appealing, in my PhD research I found that example usage is substantially diverse.  Its benefits are not consensually appreciated by the developers, the software development community does not address the barriers and challenges that accompany extensive example usage, and there is no explicit, widely accepted set of best practices for using examples methodologically nor systematically. In general, the software development community perceives example usage merely as a programming technique rather than acknowledges it as a fundamental software activity and as an expression of the software reuse principle.

In the talk I will describe my PhD research, in which we used various empirical tools for data gathering including: field observations, interviews, surveys, reflective questionnaires, focus groups and virtual focus groups. Each of these tools provides additional evidence for example usage diversity. I'll conclude by proposing a comprehensive approach to leverage the benefits of example usage in professional software development.

Based on PhD dissertation, co-supervised by Prof. Amiram Yehudai (Tel Aviv University), Prof. Orit Hazzan (Technion)