self

HINA B. SHAH

Ph.D. Student @ Georgia Tech

Klaus Advanced Computing
266 Ferst Drive
Atlanta, GA 30332-0765
hina_dot_shah_at_gatech_dot_edu

 

 

ABOUT ME

I am a Ph.D student at Georgia Tech working with advisors Mary Jean Harrold and Nancy Nersessian. I did my undergrad in Information Technology from Thadomal Shahani Engineering College, India, and then Master's in Software Engineering from Birla Institute of Technology and Science, India. My research interest include exploring how culture impacts outsourced offshored software-testing practices. I am using ethnography as a tool to study this problem.

In the past, I have worked on understanding how software developers use exception handling and developed a visualization tool called Exception Handling Centric (EnHanCe) visualization. The tool provided three views that helped software developers to visualize exception flow information at three different level of details (refer to my publications for details). Additionally, I conducted follow-up qualitative studies to evaluate the visualization. Moreover, I conducted qualitative studies with novice and expert developers to understand their perspectives on exception handling concept and structures.

I have had opportunities to intern at several different places. In summer 2008, I was an intern at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center in Hawthorne, NY. I was a part Social Computing Group and I was working on the Longitude Timeline Visualization project with Robert Farrell, Thomas Erickson, and Wendy Kellog. I was involved in conducting qualitative studies to understand how people managed their long-term organizational process related tasks and whether our interface could assist them better.

In summer 2009, I interned at a large software service organization in India (cannot reveal the name due to IRB restrictions). Here, I worked closely work industry practitioners towards understanding some key socio-cultural challenges involved in real-world software maintenance and testing practice. Also, this was my first experience (at attempting) to conduct an ethnographic study.

In summer 2010, I worked with Saurabh Sinha in the Indian Research Lab (IRL), IBM Research, India. I conducted additional field studies (this was my second experience conducting ethnography) to understand the software-testing practice in an outsourced-offshored setting.

 

 

 

 


Course Projects
Project Title Description
image6 Using Visualization For Debugging Faults In Recursive Functions In this project the focus is on developing a way to visualize dynamic execution of recursive functions in the programs. The visualization is developed with an aim to help the programmers in understanding the execution of recursions and also to assist in evaluating the computation of the output. Thus the visualization, which is developed with an aim to visualize every round of the recursion being executed in the program and which displays useful state information, can be used by the developers for debugging faults in their recursive functions.
image2 Supporting Parent-Child Communication in Distributed Families The primary focus of this project was to provide support for distributed families (e.g., divorced parents) by developing a technology that could help parents and children connect when they are apart. To do so, we conducted online interviews with "virtual visitation" experts and ran a study to evaluate an interface we built by asking parents and their children to complete common-place tasks using our communication system.
image3 Semantic Zooming into Code One of the existing challenges in the domain of software engineering
is comprehending large programs quickly. In this project I developed a program visualization technique to make code viewing and program comprehension tasks simpler. To demonstrate the technique, I developed a prototype interface that facilitates viewing of the structural (e.g., packages, sub-packages, classes within packages) and contextual (code in this case) details of a software project
simultaneously. The interface also provides with a facility to drill down to complex details, whenever required, and abstract out the details, when not needed. An informal survey to evaluate the interface indicated that our proposed technique can be helpful in tasks such as quick understanding of existing software projects, getting quick overview of others code.
image5 PhotoAlbum In this project, I created a photo album application from scratch using Java Swing. The application had ability to add or delete photos, annotate the a photo with text and drawings at its back, view all photo thumbnails in a light table, and scroll through the photos.
image4 Home Network Troubleshooting Strategies

This project involved conducting user studies to gather understand about the problems people have with computing, networking, AV equipment.Through the analysis results we found that once a problem occurs, the helpees initially try to solve the problem actively, but after reaching a threshold (which is determined by various factors such as time urgency, motivation, and degree of complexity) they seek help from helpers by asking for their active participant in problem solving, and the helpees then take a back seat by getting into passive mode of problem solving (which typically is learning mode, or ignoring by just getting the problem solved).”

 
image1 Influences Among Research Institutes In this project, we built visualization that aid in understanding the influences that research institutions in the domain of software engineering have on each other over a period of time. We define ’influence’ based on the number of papers that reference a paper published in University U, and the number of papers University U publishes in a conference C. The research institutes we included are universities and research organizations that actively publish in conferences. Please click here to view the video of the project demonstration.
PUBLICATIONS

2010

  • Automated Bug Neighborhood Analysis for Identifying Incomplete Bug Fixes. Mijung Kim, Saurabh Sinha, Carsten Görg, Hina Shah, Mary Jean Harrold, Mangala Gowri Nanda. International Conference on Software Testing 2010: 383-392
  • Understanding Exception Handling: Viewpoints of Novices and Experts. Hina Shah, Carsten Görg, Mary Jean Harrold. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. 36(2): 150-161 (2010) (selected as the Featured Paper for the March/April 2010 Issue)

2009

2008