Keynote Talk: Studying Humans in Software Engineering: Trade-offs and decisions

Software development is a human activity and understanding software requires understanding humans that create it, both their individual experiences and the ways they work as part of a team.Of course, these two cannot be completely separated since the ways we feel and work as individuals influences and is influenced by the ways we collaborate and communicate.What makes this even more complicated is that nowadays teams tend to involve both human and artificial developers, namely bots.To illustrate these two sides of our research in this talk we start by discussing two recent studies focusing on individual experiences and teamwork, and then we reconsider these studies from a methodological perspective: we zoom in on how these studies have been conducted and what trade-offs design decisions have been embedded in these studies.Based on this reflection we sketch the space for future research on human aspects in software engineering.