Prf Helen Sharp

Professor Emeritus in Software Engineering

Faculty of Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics

helen.sharp@open.ac.uk

Biography

Professional biography

Helen completed her undergraduate studies in Mathematics, and postgraduate studies in Computer Science at University College London before joining a software house in London. As a programmer, she developed and maintained software systems for a range of clients including City Traders, Oil Companies and Publishing Companies. In 1987 she came to the Open University as a temporary lecturer in Computing. Between 1987 and 2008, she held several posts at the OU and elsewhere including City University London, CTC Trust and various publishing companies and architectural practices. Since 2008 she has been Professor of Software Engineering in the School of Computing and Communications. Helen holds a Postgraduate Certificate in Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, is a Fellow of the HEA, a Chartered IT Professional and a Chartered Engineer.

Helen’s professional activities have ranged across several disciplines of Computer Science including HCI, Software Engineering and Project Management, and have reached out to other related disciplines such as Education and Design Studies. This diversity has been reflected in Helen’s Teaching and Research interests, but a constant in both has been the desire to engage with practice – to understand and try to improve practice.

In 2014 Helen became Associate Dean for Research, Scholarship and Enterprise in the Maths and Computing Faculty, and in 2016 was appointed as Associate Dean for Research and Scholarship in the newly-formed STEM Faculty. She has recently been granted emeritus status and continues to support research activities within the School.

Research interests

Leveraging her expertise in both HCI and Software Engineering, Helen’s research focuses on the study of professional software practice in industry, specifically the human and social aspects of software development. This focus on human factors has led her to adopt qualitative techniques and theories from other disciplines including distributed cognition, design reflective practice, interaction analysis and technological frames. She was a founding organiser of the popular CHASE workshops (now an annual conference) held in conjunction with ICSE every year since 2008, and has been a persistent advocate for developer-centred research since the 1980s. Recent activities include:

Helen has been researching socio-technical resilience of the software development environment, under EPSRC’s People at the Heart of Software Engineering initiative. This project is run in partnership with University of Lancaster and the Software Sustainability Institute.
Funded by NCSC, a team of researchers has been studying how to improve the security of software systems by focusing on the motivation profile of developers. This has resulted in a set of practitioner-focused packs designed to sensitise developers to security issues. These and other project outputs are available from motivatingjenny.org.
Since 2013, Helen has been working with researchers from UCLAN and the OU, partnered with the Agile Business Consortium and a variety of industrial collaborators to study agility in practice. Initially focused on software development teams, the notion of agility is being applied in a wide range of sectors and across the enterprise as a whole. The work in this project is available at agileresearch.network.

Helen has supervised PhD students in the areas of HCI, ACI (animal-computer interaction) and software engineering, with a key focus on integration with practice.

Teaching interests

Helen's main teaching interests are in Interaction Design. She is the joint author of one of the leading international textbooks on HCI, Interaction Design: beyond human-computer interaction (id-book.com) which has been translated into 7 languages, most recently Portuguese (for Brazil) and Japanese; it is now in its 6th edition. She has been involved in HCI modules at the OU since the early 1990s, including chairing production and presentation of the undergraduate module M364 between 2003 and 2016, and its delivery to over 4000 students in Botswana as part of a computer science programme of study. Helen has also contributed to undergraduate and postgraduate modules in software engineering, object-oriented development and project management.

Impact and engagement

Helen has undertaken a wide range of activities within the community:

Member of EPSRC’s Strategic Advisory Network (SAN) and its peer review college. She has chaired institutional review panels for EPSRC, been asked to comment on research council reports and reviewed many research applications from the UK and abroad.
Member of evaluation committees in Sweden (Scientific Advisory Board for the Industrial Excellence Center for Embedded Applications Software Engineering (EASE, http://ease.cs.lth.se), Finland and Canada (Chair and then member of the Advisory Board for NSERC’s SurfNet programme (http://www.nsercsurfnet.org/), and was a Panel member for the Software Audit and Advisory Review for Diamond Light (Harwell Campus) in October 2012.
Served on the programme committees for a range of international conferences, including ICSE, XP, CHASE and CHI, co-chairing the Software Engineering in Practice track for the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) in 2019.
Associate editor for IEEE Software and IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, and member of editorial boards for journals in Computer Science Education and Empirical Software Engineering.

External collaborations

Helen works closely with practitioners in industry as well as researchers in other universities across the globe.

Projects

Socio-technical resilience in software development (STRIDE)

The project will investigate resilience and automation in the socio-technical system that supports software development, which includes people , technical infrastructure, processes and artefacts . Recognising that users are developers and developers are users in different contexts, we’d like to investigate two communities that represent different points along that dimension: commercial software development community and professional end user development community.

Empirical Data-Driven Bug Localisation in Software Development

In software engineering, developers must respond quickly to the change requests raised by product customers. For example, when a bug report arrives, developers need to locate relevant code to patch the bug. External to the product teams, however, customers can only describe the bug using their own (natural) language, with limited understanding of the software. Such a description may not reflect the developers’ rich experience and their deeper understanding of the software architecture, design, data structures, algorithms, etc. Hence substantial amount of time must be wasted on triaging, from a vast repository, where to start the investigation. It is like searching needles in a haystack [1]. To tackle this problem, existing work on bug localisation employs various heuristics in the natural language description of bugs and code to achieve state-of-the-art performance on information retrieval metrics, such as precision/recall and top-K [1]. Precision measures how many pieces of recommended code are indeed related to an average bug report; recall measures how many pieces of code known relevant to a bug report have been recommended; and top-K measures how many out of the K recommended pieces of code are relevant to a bug report. However, existing research methods developed since Zhou et al. [2] are competing against a benchmark of only 4~6 medium-sized open-source Java projects mostly taken from Eclipse development. Although various information retrieval approaches have been attempted, and compared on top of this benchmark, there is a lot of uncertainty as to how they apply to Huawei’s contexts. In this project, we will tackle these challenges with practicability and adoptability in mind.

Agile Business Consortium research grant - 2022-2025

The Agile Research Network was formed in 2013 as a collaboration between experienced academics at the Open University and the University of Central Lancashire who all had a long-standing interest in understanding more about agile approaches in the IT workplace. Another common interest was our focus on understanding practice and the value of sharing research findings with practitioners. Our strap line, Bridging the gap between research and practice, neatly sums up our aims. From the beginning we have worked closely with, and been funded by, the DSDM/ABC Consortium. This collaboration has brought an objective, research-led perspective on Agile practices to ABC, its members, and the wider business agility community of practitioners. We conduct multiple research studies, publish widely, and gain international recognition for our work. Our purpose is to: • Respond to the need for case studies and research by agile practitioners • Be a critical friend to the organisations we work with • Bring a different perspective • Bring rigour through academic research • Publish research • Bring the practice perspective into research conversations • Communicate about agile research with different audiences

Evaluation of online research portals and repositories (DFID)

"This project involves evaluating the usability and effectiveness of DFID research portals. DFID has proposed a Theory of Change Model which is a guiding framework for conducting evaluations. Te primary purpose of the evaluation is to “evaluate the success and value for money of DFID-funded work to communicate research online”. For example, the findings in relation to Eldis will provide evidence on the performance of the Global Open Knowledge Hub programme at outcome level. The findings will also inform DFID decision-making about its future portfolio. The secondary purpose of this evaluation is to “strengthen the evidence base that supports research communication in the interests of international development”. The aim, therefore, is to investigate robustly the information needs and information seeking behaviour on the internet of development decision-makers and related actors, as well as the extent to which needs are met by current portals and repositories."

Novice interaction designers' behaviour in different cultures. (XC-10-070-HS)

In this project we will study the design activities of UK and Botswana students through constrained tasks and longitudinal observation, identifying differences and suggesting techniques to encourage and support the development of creative, reflective and independent design strategies that are sympathetic to the African context. We will compare the design strategies adopted by UK and Botswana students, and will suggest simple techniques that Botswana students may be taught to encourage and develop reflective thinking. This will have an immediate impact on the OU’s current module as well as future design modules. With the support of Botho College’s senior staff we will also disseminate our findings to educational policy makers within Botswana as a first step in producing a more practical and lasting impact on interaction design education in Southern Africa.