Research project title

User-centered traceability in the DevOps era

Education level

Master or doctorate

Director/co-director

Director: Jinghui Cheng

Co-director(s): Prof. Weiyi Shang (Concordia), Prof. Jin Guo (McGill)

End of display

May 6, 2023

Areas of expertise

Software engineering

Unit(s) and department(s)

Department of Computer Engineering and Software Engineering

Detailed description

In the recent rise of large-scale software-intensive systems, software quality and user experience have become a critical, yet complex and challenging problem. Software stakeholders (e.g. developers, designers, operators, and end users) collaboratively examine and respond to these challenges through system issues, which encapsulate units of work, to achieve system improvements. The widely adopted DevOps software practice, however, has exposed new difficulties to the management of system issues. First, work around system issues in DevOps is distributed among different roles, each has unique expertise and information needs. Second, concerns about user privacy (e.g. in GDPR) are an increasingly crucial factor when DevOps is combined with user-centered practices to incorporate user data and feedback. These challenges require role-based, user-centered, and privacy-sensitive traceability solutions to dynamically construct the interrelationships among system issues, issue-related activities, and various software artifacts and knowledge sources. This project targets this problem and investigates role-based, dynamically-established, knowledge source-enhanced traceability methods to support system issue-related tasks in the DevOps environment.

The HCDLab (https://jhcheng.me/lab/) of Polytechnique Montreal is searching for PhD or master's students for this and several other projects. Prospective students should have a marked interest in human-computer interaction and user-centered research. Interested applicants should contact Prof. Jinghui Cheng at jinghui.cheng@polymtl.ca. In the application package, please include (1) a CV, (2) a cover letter describing your research interests and previous research experiences, and (3) school transcript.

Financing possibility

Financial support is available.