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
December 31, 2022
Areas of expertise
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 master or doctorate students for this and several other projects. Prospective students should have a marked interest in software engineering, human-computer interaction, and/or user-centered research. Interested applicants should contact Prof. Jinghui Cheng at jinghui.cheng@polymtl.ca.
Financing possibility
Financial support is available.

Jinghui Cheng
Associate Professor