Thomas LaToza

I study programming and design tools to help developers work better. I investigate how tools and practices support work through studies, including field observations, surveys, controlled experiments, and interviews. Much of my research focuses on helping developers answer questions more quickly and accurately through tools that support the ways in which developers answer questions. In my dissertation work, I found that many of developers' most frequent, time-consuming, and error prone questions involved searches across control flow and designed a tool that let developers directly answer these questions. More broadly, my research interests are in software engineering and human computer interaction.

Some guidance on designing useful tools for developers.

What do we know about human aspects of software development? See the bibliography we developed for our course.

How have popular topics and research methods in software engineering research changed over time? compare the tag clouds

Recent Papers

LaToza, T. D., Towne, W. B., van der Hoek, A., and Herbsleb, J. D. (2013). Crowd development. In the Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering at ICSE '13.

LaToza, T. D., Shabani, E., and van der Hoek, A. (2013). A study of architectural decision practices. In the Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering at ICSE '13.

Loksa, D., Mangano, N., LaToza T., and van der Hoek, A. (2013). Enabling a classroom design studio with a collaborative sketch design tool. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Engineering, Education Track (ICSE). San Francisco, CA.

Omar, C., Yoon, Y., LaToza, T.D., and Myers, B.A. (2012). Active code completion. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), Zurich, Switzerland.

LaToza, T.D., and Myers, B.A. (2011). Designing useful tools for developers. In the Third Workshop on the Evaluation and Usability of Programming Languages and Tools at SPLASH '11.

LaToza, T.D., and Myers, B.A. (2011). Visualizing call graphs. In Proceedings of the Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC), Pittsburgh, PA.

LaToza, T.D., and Myers, B.A. (2010). Developers ask reachability questions. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), Cape Town, South Africa, May 1-8, 185-194.