I am delighted to announce that our research on making software developers more productive by unlocking the insights hidden in their repositories will be funded by the Australian Government through the Australian Research Council’s Discovery Early Career Researcher Award (DECRA) scheme. The funding of $361k will allow me to spend 80 per cent of my time on research activities related to the successful proposal for the next three years. Only 197 DECRA grants were awarded this year. Here’s the proposal summary (see our FSE ’15 paper for more details):

This project aims to create technologies for automatically repackaging, interpreting, and aggregating software development activity. The project will devise new natural-language summarisation approaches and productivity metrics that use all data available in a software repository. This is likely to lead to knowledge and tools that allow organisations to quickly integrate new developers into existing software projects, to improve project awareness, and to increase productivity goals. The outcomes would include a comprehensive decision and awareness support system for software projects, based on automating the creation and continual updating of developer activity summaries and measures.