Human Aspects of Software Engineering: Social and Cognitive Perspectives

Google Tech Talks March, 20 2008 ABSTRACT The talk focuses on human aspects of software engineering and illustrates how agile software development helps coping with some challenges of software projects. The talk is based on the working assumption that the people involved in software development processes deserve more attention. In this spirit, the talk attempts to highlight the world of software engineering from the perspective of the main actors - mainly, individuals and teams - involved in software development processes in general and in agile software development environments in particular. Specifically, social and cognitive aspects are highlighted, by addressing the following topics: collaboration, abstraction processes and testing. Speaker: Dr. Orit Hazzan Dr. Orit Hazzan is an associate professor at the Department of Education in Technology and Science of the Technion - Israel Institute of Technology and the associate dean of the Technion Undergraduate Studies. In May 2004 she published her book "Human Aspects of Software Engineering", co-authored with the late Jim Tomayko. Her second book "Agile Software Engineering", co-authored with Yael Dubinsky, will be published by Springer in Spring 2008. In parallel to her research work, she is a consultant for several software projects in the Israeli software industry. She is the author of about 100 papers and presents her research at computer science and software engineering education conferences (e.g., SIGCSE), as well as at conferences that deal with software engineering in general (such as, ICSE) and agile software development in particular (e.g., the XP and the Agile Conferences).