Software engineering research has the potential to improve software quality and reduce cost. Too often, software engineering techniques are not adopted in practice due to fundamental usability problems. My research identifies these problems, and then I design techniques that improve software quality by (1) automatically transforming impractical techniques into usable and effective ones and (2) increasing the applicability of existing techniques.

In this talk, I focus on two usability problems. First, I will describe a technique that automatically transforms an analysis into a continuous one that executes after each keystroke. Despite the benefits of continuous analysis tools, most analysis tools are not continuous and require the developer to manually invoke the tool. Building continuous analysis tools is difficult. Previously, designing a continuous analysis required: (1) designing the analysis itself and (2) expanding its design to account for continuous execution, such as for concurrent changes to the codebase and for unobtrusive notification of results. My technique trivializes the second stage, letting researchers focus on the analysis design without detracting from usability and usefulness, while enabling the benefits of continuous analyses.

Second, I will describe a technique that automatically creates a complete and fine-grained development history. A project's development history is useful to developers, for instance in localizing the cause of a regression failure. Unfortunately, manually-managed histories are incomplete and coarse-grained, which makes them inadequate for many development tasks. Utilizing this complete and fine-grained history, my technique enables new types of historical analyses, and improves existing historical analyses.

Kivanç Muslu is a last-year PhD candidate in the Computer Science & Engineering department at the University of Washington. His research interests are software engineering and programming languages. He develops techniques that increase the applicability of existing analyses and make it easier to implement new analyses. Kivan was the 5th best student, out of over 1.8 million students, in the University Entrance Exams (ÖSS). He received his B.Sc. degree in Computer Engineering with the valedictorian award from Koç University. He has been an intern at Microsoft Research, Facebook, and the University of Twente.