Nicholas Nelson

I'm a PhD candidate advised by Anita Sarma in the Electrical Engineering & Computer Science department at Oregon State University, where I also obtained my BS in Computer Science in June 2015. As an undergraduate, I interned at Intel Corporation and Hewlett Packard Enterprise, and conducted my senior project with Garmin AT. Previously, I was a Research Intern at Microsoft in the PROSE team (mentored by Titus Barik), and a Systems Analyst in healthcare IT and DevOps.

My research interests are at the intersections of software engineering, human-computer interactions, and developers tools. I am currently exploring the effects of designing integrated development environments (IDEs) with human cognition and spatial interactions as core tenets of problem-solving within software. I also conduct research into software development processes such as merge conflicts, continuous integration, and test-driven development (TDD).

Publications

2022 April	Cognitive Biases in Software Development Souti Chattopadhyay, Nicholas Nelson, Audrey Au, Natalia Morales, Christopher Sanchez, Rahul Pandita, Anita Sarma. Communications of the ACM, Volume 65, Issue 4. pp 115-122. [Author Copy]
2020 August	Supporting Code Comprehension via Annotations: Right Information at the Right Time and Place Marjan Adeli, Nicholas Nelson, Souti Chattopadhyay, Hayden Coffey, Austin Henley, Anita Sarma. VL/HCC'20, Dunedin, New Zealand, August 10, 2020 (AR: 30.0%). [Conference] [Pre-print (May'20)] [Slides]
May	A Tale from the Trenches: Cognitive Biases and Software Development Souti Chattopadhyay, Nicholas Nelson, Audrey Au, Natalia Morales, Christopher Sanchez, Rahul Pandita, Anita Sarma. ICSE'20, Seoul, South Korea, May 23, 2020 (AR: 20.9%). [Conference] [Pre-print (Feb'20)] [Distinguished Paper Award] [2020 SIGSOFT Research Highlights]
2019 May	Latent Patterns in Activities: A Field Study of How Developers Manage Context Souti Chattopadhyay, Nicholas Nelson, Yenifer Ramirez Gonzalez, Annel Amelia Leon, Rahul Pandita, Anita Sarma. ICSE'19, Montreal, Canada, May 25, 2019 (AR: 20.6%). [Conference] [Pre-print (Feb'19)] [Artifacts]
February	The Life-Cycle of Merge Conflicts: Processes, Barriers, and Strategies Nicholas Nelson, Caius Brindescu, Shane McKee, Anita Sarma, Danny Dig. EMSE, Empirical Software Engineering Journal (Springer), February 2019. [Journal] [Pre-print (Feb'19)] [Artifacts]
2018 May	Context in Programming: An Investigation of How Programmers Create Context Souti Chattopadhyay, Nicholas Nelson, Thien Nam, McKenzie Calvert, Anita Sarma. CHASE'18: Short Paper, Gothenburg, Sweden, May 27, 2018. [Conference] [Pre-print (Apr'18)]
2017 September	Software Practitioner Perspectives on Merge Conflicts and Resolutions Shane McKee, Nicholas Nelson, Anita Sarma, Danny Dig. ICSME'17, Shanghai, China, Sept. 17-22, 2017 (AR: 27.8%). [Conference] [Pre-print (Aug'17)] [Slides] [Artifacts] [IEEE Software Blog] [Distinguished Paper Award]
	Trade-Offs in Continuous Integration: Assurance, Security, and Flexibility Michael Hilton, Nicholas Nelson, Timothy Tunnell, Darko Marinov, Danny Dig. ESEC/FSE'17, Paderborn, Germany, Sept. 4-8, 2017 (AR: 24.4%). [Conference] [Pre-print (Aug'17)] [Artifacts] [Distinguished Paper Award]
July	Towards an IDE to Support Programming as Problem-Solving Nicholas Nelson, Anita Sarma, André van der Hoek. PPIG'17, Delft, Netherlands, Jul 1-3, 2017. [Conference] [Session] [Slides] [Project Code]
	Problem-Solving Applications in Developer Environments Nicholas Nelson. PPIG'17: Doctoral Consortium, Delft, Netherlands, Jul 1-3, 2017. [Conference] [Session]
2016 May	TDDViz: Using Software Changes to Understand Conformance to Test Driven Development Michael Hilton, Nicholas Nelson, Hugh McDonald, Sean McDonald, Ron Metoyer, Danny Dig. XP'16, Edinburgh, United Kingdom, May 24-27, 2016. [Conference] [Pre-print (Mar'16)] [Project Code]

Teaching

Teaching Assistant:

CS567 - Laboratory Studies in Software Engineering and Human-Computer Interaction (Fall 2021)
CS560 - Data-Driven Software Engineering (Fall 2020)
CS419/579 - Usable Security (Winter 2020)
CS362 - Software Engineering II (Spring 2020, Spring 2022)
CS361 - Software Engineering I (Winter 2022, Fall 2017, Winter 2017, Winter 2016)
CS344 - Operating Systems I (Winter 2023, Fall 2022)

Service

PC Member:
- PROMISE 2020 Replication Challenge Track
Reviewer:
- ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM) 2023
- Empirical Software Engineering Journal (EMSE) 2022
- IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering Journal (TSE) 2020
- Empirical Software Engineering Journal (EMSE) 2020
Sub-Reviewer:
- IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE) 2019, 2018, 2017, 2015
- ACM Joint European Software Engineering Confrence and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE) 2020, 2019
- IEEE/ACM International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC) 2020
- Mining Software Repositories (MSR) 2017
- IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC) 2019
- ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST) 2017
Student Volunteer:
- International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) 2019
Mentor:
- Neha Sajnani (MS, Oregon State University)
- Andrea Tongsak (Undergrad, Oregon State University)
- Leif Tsang (Undergrad, Oregon State University)
- Karen Berba (Undergrad, Oregon State University Ecampus)
- Jett Seale (Undergrad, Oregon State University)
- Ben Klein (Undergrad, University of Tennessee)
- Cheng Qing Lim (Undergrad, Oregon State University)
- Hayden Coffey (Undergrad, University of Tennessee)
- Annel Amelia Leon (HS, Corvallis High School)
- Yenifer Ramirez Gonzalez (Undergrad, Oregon State University)
- Thien Nam (Undergrad, Oregon State University)
- McKenzie Calvert (Undergrad, Oregon State University)
- Lauren Gastineau (Undergrad, Oregon State University)
- Brandon Dring (Undergrad, Oregon State University)
- Jacob Lewis (Undergrad, Oregon State University)
- George Harder (Undergrad, Oregon State University)