Event Details

Join us for our January seminar as we welcome Helen Sharp, a Professor of Software Engineering at the Open University, UK. Her research investigates professional software practice with a focus on human and social aspects of software development and she has been studying agile practice since 2000.

Software security is in the headlines on a regular basis. Researchers have asked why is it that we still have breaches, caused by common vulnerabilities, and there are some calls for developers to do more. However there has been little focus on the developers’ point of view, and understanding how security features in the day-to-day work of a development team. This is not a technical security seminar but one focused on reflection about security as non-specialist development practitioners see it in practice. The work presented has arisen through a project called “Motivating Jenny to write secure software: community and culture of coding”, funded by NCSC. We have been conducting ethnographic studies in physical and virtual settings with professional developers, focusing on the role that community and culture play in secure coding, and using motivation theory as a framework. This seminar will discuss our current results and future directions.

Helen Sharp is Professor of Software Engineering at the Open University, UK. Her research investigates professional software practice with a focus on human and social aspects of software development and she has been studying agile practice since 2000. Sharp has led multi-disciplinary research projects into software practice with partners in the UK and abroad, and conducts her research exclusively in-situ with software practitioners in their industrial context. Sharp is joint author of one of the leading HCI textbooks, Interaction Design now in its 4^th edition. She is also on the editorial board for EMSE and JSS, serves on the Advisory Board for IEEE Software and will chair ICSE’s software practice track in 2019.