Dr. Matthew Davis

Assistant Teaching Professor, Software and Societal Systems

Bio

Software engineers are users, too! My research focuses on improving the human ability to ask and answer the fundamental question, “Is this program doing what we want?” To move this research forward, I use empirical and theoretical methods that center on human studies of professional software engineers at top companies like Google, Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and Meta. I also lead teams of students and partners in the design and construction of state-of-the-art, human-focused development tools, such as the NaNofuzz automatic test suite generator.

I publish and speak internationally at top venues in software engineering, such as FSE, ICSE, and TOSEM, about automated software engineering, engineer-focused tool development, and how researchers can use their empirical work as a springboard for theoretical research. My research is funded by the National Science Foundation as well as various industry partners.

My research and teaching are influenced by twenty years of building and operating critical software systems, including requirements, design, architecture, construction, testing, quality assurance, project management, communication, negotiation, integration, lifecycle management, and the management of geographically distributed infrastructure, vendors, and teams. My industry experience encompasses important adjacent aspects of critical software systems, such as data center infrastructure, compute, storage, power, environmental systems, disaster recovery, physical security and cybersecurity, cloud computing, identity management, procurement, LAN, WAN, MAN, SAN, delivery controllers, user support, mergers and acquisitions, budgeting, and service and process management.

My experience ranges from startups to some of the world’s largest companies and includes bringing new products to market. It can be fashionable to call projects “moonshots.” I have actual moonshot project experience with the Iris Lunar Rover, which put a student-built robot into space on a shoestring budget. My career is about being curious, running toward hard problems, and figuring out what we need to learn and accomplish to build better programs that actually do what we want.