Seminar:
Explicit Programming Strategies

ABSTRACT

Software developers vary in how productive they are in solving programming problems. What makes a great software engineer is the expertise, skills, and strategies they use to tackle everyday programming tasks. I envision a future where all programmers achieve expert-level proficiency. To this end, I explore how human and computer interaction can support this goal and how software tools and machine intelligence can make this foreseeable practical.  In this talk, I will demonstrate how developers can attain expert efficiency through an expert "Explicit Programming Strategy." I'll introduce "HowToo", a platform facilitating the sharing, requesting, and utilization of these strategies equipped with features to enhance decision-making and problem-solving skills. This comprehensive framework forms the basis for a new era of intelligent problem-solving and programming learning by automating strategy suggestions based on the problem context. I will also introduce a novel problem-solving methodology, Strategy-Driven Development (SDD), integrating it into Software Engineering and Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), emphasizing selecting the most suitable strategy based on the problem context to enhance proficiency in task accomplishment. 

Maryam Arab

George Mason University

Maryam Arab is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Computer Science at George Mason University. Her research focuses on human aspects of software development, spanning empirical studies and developing novel tools for programming, problem-solving, and knowledge sharing. She has conducted several studies on Software Engineering and Human-Computer Interaction through various methods, including field observations, lab studies, interviews, surveys, and deployments of tools. Her work has focused on making all programmers experts at a faster pace and has been published in the top software engineering and human-computer interaction journals and conferences, such as ESE, ICSE, IEEE VL/HCC, and CHI and her recent paper on implementation design decisions of developers has received the distinguished paper award at ICSE 2023.