The Need for Context in Software Engineering (IEEE CS Harlan Mills Award Keynote)

The development of a software system requires the orchestration of many different people using many different tools. Despite the need for a developer who is performing a task to understand the context in which that task is undertaken, the tools we imagine, build and provide to support software developers are typically isolated. Instead of the tools helping a developer work within the appropriate context, it is the developer who must bring the context to the tools. In this talk, I will argue that the lack of context in the software engineering tools we build limits the effectiveness of developers and of our software development practices.