Talk at the Attic tonight on usability and static analysis tools

[foxfirefey]

Brittany Johnson will be speaking at the Attic tonight (at roughly 7pm) about her research. In her words:

A little about me; I'm a Ph.D. student at NC State University in Raleigh, NC (starting my 3rd year). I work under Emerson Murphy-Hill and Sarah Heckman in the Developer Liberation Front. My research area is software engineering/software development tools. I had a paper at ICSE this past year ("Why Don't Software Developers Use Static Analysis Tools to Find Bugs?") and was just awarded an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship to begin in the Fall.

Our lab is focused on improving the usability of program analysis tools, such as static analysis and refactoring tools, so that developers want to (and do) use these tools. My research began with an investigation into why developers do and don't use static analysis tools (such as FindBugs) to improve the quality of their code. One of my findings was that difficulty understanding the feedback they are given is one barrier to use for many developers. This brought me to my current project where I am investigating the expressiveness and scalability of program analysis tool notifications. I will be talking about my research and the direction we see it going.