Most programs today are written not by professional software developers, but by people
with expertise in other domains working towards goals for which they need computational …

Debugging is still among the most common and costly of programming activities. One reason
is that current debugging tools do not directly support the inquisitive nature of the activity. …

There is little understanding of how people describe software problems, but a variety of tools
solicit, manage, and analyze these descriptions in order to streamline software development…

In the past few decades there has been considerable work on empowering end users to be
able to write their own programs, and as a result, users are indeed doing so. In fact, we …

Much of software developers' time is spent understanding unfamiliar code. To better understand
how developers gain this understanding and how software development environments …

As programming skills increase in demand and utility, the learnability of end-user programming
systems is of utmost importance. However, research on learning barriers in programming …

Previous research has documented the fragmented nature of software development work. To
explain this in more detail, we analyzed software developers' day-to-day information needs…

When software developers want to understand the reason for a program's behavior, they
must translate their questions about the behavior into a series of questions about code, …

Software developers are rooted in the written form of their code, yet they often draw diagrams
representing their code. Unfortunately, we still know little about how and why they create …

Empirical studies, often in the form of controlled experiments, have been widely adopted in
software engineering research as a way to evaluate the merits of new software engineering …