美国软件工程专家学术讲座

A Foraging-Theoretic Approach to Software Engineering

主讲人 : Nan Niu Ph.D

Software development is a human-centric activity. Developers often spend valuable time carrying out information-intensive tasks, such as debugging, refactoring, and reuse. In this talk, I present an evolutionary-ecological understanding about how developers seek and collect relevant information in software engineering. The basic idea is to model developers as predators in pursuit of prey (the relevant information), and to leverage the optimal food-foraging principles to characterize a rational decision-making process. In this way, the optimal developer’s behavior can be mathematically formalized in light of the “built-in” mechanisms that evolved to help our animal ancestors to find food. I then describe two empirical studies on software traceability to apply the foraging-theoretic  work. I conclude the talk by sharing my vision for new research directions aimed at enabling developers to best shape themselves to their information and task environments, as well as enabling the environments to be best shaped to software developers.

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主讲人简介：

 Nan Niu, Ph.D. Assistant Professor, Department of EECS, University of Cincinnati, USA

Nan Niu is an assistant professor with the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computing Systems, University of Cincinnati, USA. He received the B.Eng. degree from the Beijing Institute of Technology, the M.Sc. degree from the University of Alberta, and the Ph.D. degree from the University of Toronto, all in computer science. His current research interests include software requirements engineering, information seeking in software engineering, and human-centered computing. Dr. Niu is a recipient of the U.S. National Science Foundation Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Award and the best research paper award at this year’s IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE 2016).