Software development is a human activity and understanding software requires understanding humans that create it, both their individual experiences and the ways they work as part of a team. Of course, these two cannot be completely separated since the ways we feel and work as individuals influences and is influenced by the ways we collaborate and communicate. What makes this even more complicated is that nowadays teams tend to involve both human and artificial developers, namely bots. To illustrate these two sides of our research in this talk we start by discussing two recent studies focusing on individual experiences and teamwork, and then we reconsider these studies from a methodological perspective: we zoom in on how these studies have been conducted and what trade-offs design decisions have been embedded in these studies. Based on this reflection we sketch the space for future research on human aspects in software engineering.

Alexander Serebrenik is a full professor of social software engineering at the Eindhoven University of Technology, The Netherlands. His research goal is to facilitate evolution of software by taking into account social aspects of software development. His work tends to involve theories and methods both from within computer science (e.g., theory of socio-technical coordination; methods from natural language processing, machine learning) and from outside of computer science (e.g., organisational psychology). The underlying idea of his work is that of empiricism, i.e., that addressing software engineering challenges should be grounded in observation and experimentation, and requires a combination of the social and the technical perspectives. Alexander has co-authored a book “Evolving Software Systems” (Springer Verlag, 2014), “Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in Software Engineering: Best Practices and Insights” (APress, 2024) and more than 250 scientific papers and articles. He is actively involved in organisation of scientific conferences and is member of the editorial board of several journals. He has won multiple best paper and distinguished reviewer awards. Alexander is a senior member of IEEE and a member of ACM. Contact him at a.serebrenik@tue.nl.