Saba
Alimadadi, Postdoctoral
Researcher
Northeastern
University
Program comprehension is crucial in software engineering, a necessary step for performing many tasks. However, the implicit and intricate relations between program entities hinder comprehension of program behaviour and can easily lead to bugs. It is particularly challenging to understand and debug modern programming languages such as JavaScript, due to their dynamic, asynchronous, and event-driven nature.
The goal of my research is to facilitate program comprehension and debugging through semi-automated techniques, using both static and dynamic analyses. My techniques create behavioural models of program execution through my proposed algorithms, and visualize them for developers in order to improve their performance during program comprehension and debugging. The outcome of my work is a set of open-source tools, which I evaluate through controlled experiments in realistic settings. The results show that my methods significantly improve developers’ performance in terms of task completion duration and accuracy.
Bio: Saba Alimadadi is a postdoctoral researcher at Northeastern University, where she also holds an NSERC Postdoctoral Fellowship. She received her PhD from the University of British Columbia (UBC) in 2017.
Saba’s research is in the area of software engineering, with a focus on program analysis, comprehension, and debugging. At the conjunction of software engineering, programming languages, and human-computer interaction, her techniques aim at improving developers’ performance in comprehension and debugging activities. Results show that her methods significantly improve the performance of developers in their everyday tasks.