Research Programmer Position Visualizing Software Development Activity

We have a job opening for an undergraduate research programmer in the NSF SCALE project on ultra-large scale collaboration in software development. Undergraduates in Computer Science or Information Systems with web development and/or UI programming experience would be most suited for and interested in this job.

In this project we are investigating how social media and social visualizations can support collaboration in large-scale software development environments. In the face of the vast scale of software-intensive systems needed today, modern development environments fail, typically leading to information overload, and inadequate means to successfully coordinate and collaborate across organizational boundaries.

The undergraduate research assistant in this project will work with two faculty members and a PhD student on prototyping new visualizations of software developer activity. The team will be developing algorithms for prioritizing events for each developer based on their expressed interests, such as following people and watching repositories, the computed product dependencies, and the artifacts and people the developer is currently working with. The student will work with us to prototype various information and network visualizations to present the relevant data to developers and support explorations by developers and researchers of the information space.

Skills required are familiarity with programming interfaces in Java or PHP (or related language), familiarity with databases and SQL. Graphic design experience AND/OR sufficient experience or coursework in basic psychology, behavioral research methods, and statistics is also a plus. This would be a full-time paid position for the summer (40 hours/week) with the opportunity to continue into the fall.

Interested students should send a CV listing their GPA and courses taken to dabbish [at] cmu [dot] edu with the job title in the subject line of the email.