Harini Sampath
Harini has been at Google since March 2016, conducting research into developer experience. Her areas of interest are command line interfaces, APIs, documentation and accessibility of developer tools.
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From Correctness to Collaboration: A Human-Centered Taxonomy of AI Agent Behavior in Software Engineering
Sherry Y. Shi
Extended Abstracts of the 2026 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA ’26), ACM, New York, NY, USA (2026)
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The ongoing transition of Large Language Models in software engineering from code generators into autonomous agents requires a shift in how we define and measure success. While models are becoming more capable, the industry lacks a clear understanding of the behavioral norms that make an agent effective in collaborative software development in the enterprise. This work addresses this gap by presenting a taxonomy of desirable agent behaviors, synthesized from 91 sets of user-defined rules for coding agents. We identify four core expectations: Adhere to Standards and Processes, Ensure Code Quality and Reliability, Solve Problems Effectively, and Collaborate with the User. These findings offer a concrete vocabulary for agent behavior, enabling researchers to move beyond correctness-only benchmarks and design evaluations that reflect the realities of professional software development in large enterprises.
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Accessibility of Command Line Interfaces
Alice Merrick
CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2021)
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Command line interfaces (CLIs) remain a popular tool among developers and system administrators. Since CLIs are text based interfaces, they are sometimes considered accessible alternatives to predominantly visual developer tools like IDEs. However, there is no systematic evaluation of accessibility of CLIs in the literature. In this paper, we describe two studies with 12 developers on their experience of using CLIs with screen readers. Our findings show that CLIs have their own set of accessibility issues - the most important being CLIs are unstructured text interfaces. Based on our findings, we provide a set of recommendations for improving accessibility of command line interfaces.
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"It's Just Everything Outside of the IDE that's the Problem": Information Seeking by Software Developers with Visual Impairments
Kevin Mark Storer
Alice Merrick
ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (2021)
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Many efforts to increase accessibility in coding for developers with visual impairments (DWVI) have focused on supporting interactions with interactive development environments and source code. However, in order to understand how to appropriately modify and write source code, developers must seek and synthesize information from a variety of disparate and highly technical sources. DWVI might benefit from technological support in this process. But, it is unclear what accessibility issues arise in technical information sources, whether accessibility impacts strategies for seeking technical information, or how best to support DWVI in this process. We conducted observations and interviews with twelve DWVI, about their information seeking behaviors. We found that, DWVI seek information in many of the same sources as their sighted peers, and the accessibility issues identified in technical information sources were similar to those in nontechnical sources. Yet, despite these similarities, accessibility considerations impacted information seeking in highly nuanced ways.
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