Research Approach

We are in the information age, and there is an increasing need for the abstract commodity that we call software. Yet, we still have not adequately understood how to develop high-quality software systems and maintain them in a cost effective manner. I consider this a major challenge as software is increasingly becoming a part of our daily life.

Software development is a complex problem with its technical, people, and organizational aspects. Therefore, software engineering is highly interdisciplinary, and it is open to the contributions from various fields such as cognitive science, psychology, sociology, economy, as well as traditional computing areas.

In my research, I take an empirical view. I make observations, and collect and analyze data from real life development efforts. The purpose is to draw useful conclusions that can improve software quality and the efficiency and effectiveness of software development practices. I believe that the accumulation of consistent empirical results over time is important for the formation of generalizable conclusions in our discipline.

In addition, I believe that software engineering has been one of the few areas where newly proposed development techniques and methods had to be adopted by practitioners by seeing absolutely no evidence that they will scale-up and become useful in actual settings. Therefore, an empirical approach to software engineering research is necessary for an objective evaluation of the proposed  techniques and methods.

I have a pragmatic personality, which reflects to my research. A lot of research questions that I work on have direct practical implications. I also enjoy working with the researchers from other areas, such as public policy, bioinformatics, and healthcare. Doing so always gives me new perspectives in software engineering.

The interdisciplinary flavor of software engineering research is well recognized in the Information Systems Department at UMBC. Therefore, there is flexibility for our students and faculty to pursue a wide variety of questions that are important to practitioners.