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 Impact of AI Assistants on Software Developers Speaker (s):
Sebastian Baltes
Professor,
Software Engineering Group,
University of Bayreuth
| Date: Time: Venue: | | 11 March 2025, Tuesday 10:00am – 11:00am School of Computing &
Information Systems 2 (SCIS 2)
Level 4, Seminar Room 4-1
Singapore Management University
90 Stamford Road,
Singapore 178903 Please register by 10 March 2025.  |
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About the Talk Productivity is a frequently discussed but difficult to measure concept. Even in seemingly easy to quantify domains such as manufacturing, attributing a change of output to a certain change of input can be difficult. Which factors contribute to an increased output directly? Which indirectly? How do we measure input and output? Despite these challenges, consulting companies and vendors of AI assistants for software development compete to produce the boldest claims regarding the impact of generative AI on software development productivity. Often, these claims are based on self-assessed productivity. In this talk, we will take a step back and reflect on productivity and efficiency in the context of software development, and then discuss study design to assess the impact of AI assistants on software development beyond self-reports. About the Speaker Sebastian Baltes is a Professor of Software Engineering at the University of Bayreuth, Germany, and an Adjunct Professor at the University of Adelaide, Australia. He received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Trier, Germany, in 2019 and worked in the software industry for 3.5 years before moving back to academia. Prof. Baltes' research focuses on software analytics, that is, processing, analyzing, and visualizing software engineering data to monitor, govern, and improve software development processes and tools. He is further interested in interdisciplinary research and methodological aspects of empirical software engineering. For him, thoroughly analyzing and understanding the state-of-practice is an essential first step towards improving how software is being developed. Prof. Baltes' vision is that software engineering becomes more evidence-based, which is only possible if academic researchers provide actionable insights on topics that are relevant to practitioners. His research has been published in leading software engineering venues, including ICSE, FSE, TSE, TOSEM, and EMSE, and has received ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Awards in 2021 and 2023. For more information, visit https://empirical-software.engineering. |
