James Herbsleb

About

James D. Herbsleb is a professor in the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University, working within the Software and Societal Systems Department. His research focuses on the socio-technical aspects of software development and coordination, emphasizing the importance of setting up socio-technical ecosystems that enable cooperation and competition among users, developers, and businesses to build systems that meet evolving and currently unknowable needs. His work explores how software shapes the digital environment and how designing for socio-technical coordination can address the limitations of traditional software development approaches. Herbsleb's research group is funded by prominent organizations including the National Science Foundation, the Sloan Foundation, and industry leaders such as Google, IBM, Siemens, and Bosch. He has delivered keynote addresses at major conferences like the ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering and the International Conference on Software Engineering, where he has discussed topics such as coordination, openness, transparency, and organizational knowledge in software ecosystems. His contributions have been recognized with awards such as the SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award and the Alan Newell Award for Research Excellence. His work emphasizes the importance of understanding social systems in the context of software engineering to improve productivity, quality, and organizational performance.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Sociology
• Political Science
• Psychology
• Ecology
• Knowledge management
• Public relations
• Engineering
• Data science

Selected publications

• When and How to Make Breaking Changes

  ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology · 2021 · 75 citations

  Open source software projects often rely on package management systems that help projects discover, incorporate, and maintain dependencies on other packages, maintained by other people. Such systems save a great deal of effort over ad hoc ways of advertising, packaging, and transmitting useful libraries, but coordination among project teams is still needed when one package makes a breaking change affecting other packages. Ecosystems differ in their approaches to breaking changes, and there is no…

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• It’s about power: What ethical concerns do software engineers have, and what do they (feel they can) do about them?

  2023-06-12 · 73 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  How do software engineers identify and act on their ethical concerns? Past work examines how software practitioners navigate specific ethical principles such as “fairness”, but this narrows the scope of concerns to implementing pre-specified principles. In contrast, we report self-identified ethical concerns of 115 survey respondents and 21 interviewees across five continents and in non-profit, contractor, and non-tech firms. We enumerate their concerns – military, privacy, advertising, surveill…

  PublisherDOI

• Limits and Possibilities for “Ethical AI” in Open Source: A Study of Deepfakes

  2022 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency · 2022-06-20 · 52 citations

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Open source software communities are a significant site of AI development, but “Ethical AI” discourses largely focus on the problems that arise in software produced by private companies. Design, policy and tooling interventions to encourage “Ethical AI” based on studies in private companies risk being ill-suited for an open source context, which operates under radically different organizational structures, cultural norms, and incentives.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• How to Support Newcomers in Scientific Hackathons - An Action Research Study on Expert Mentoring

  Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction · 2020 · 46 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding

  Time-bounded events such as hackathons have become a global phenomenon. Scientific communities in particular show growing interest in organizing them to attract newcomers and develop technical artifacts to expand their code base. Current hackathon approaches presume that participants have sufficient expertise to work on projects on their own. They only provide occasional support by domain experts serving as mentors which might not be sufficient for newcomers. Drawing from work on workplace and e…

  DOI

• The Structure of Activity During Design Meetings

  CRC Press eBooks · 2020 · 43 citations

  The development of schemes to support design, whether behavioral methods or new technologies like groupware, should be based on detailed knowledge about how design occurs. Such data can be used to suggest what kinds of tools people might need as well as to provide a baseline for evaluating the effects of schemes for improvement. We present details of how real groups work in early software design 218meetings. We studied 10 design meetings from four projects in two organizations. The meetings were…

  DOI

Recent grants

• Coordination, communication, and collaboration in open source software development

  NSF · $400k · 2005–2009

• The Scientific Software Network Map

  NSF · $542k · 2011–2015

• HCC: Medium: Personalized information access for online deliberation systems

  NSF · $1.2M · 2013–2018

Frequent coauthors

• Audris Mockus

  27 shared

• Alexander Nolte

  24 shared

• Marcelo Cataldo

  Auckland University of Technology

  23 shared

• Laura Dabbish

  Carnegie Mellon University

  16 shared

• Bogdan Vasilescu

  Google (United States)

  14 shared

• Tapajit Dey

  11 shared

• Kathleen M. Carley

  Carnegie Mellon University

  10 shared

• Anna Filippova

  Lomonosov Moscow State University

  10 shared

Labs

• James Herbsleb's LabPI

  Not provided

Awards & honors

• SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award (2016)
• Alan Newell Award for Research Excellence (2014)
• Distinguished Paper Award at ICSE 2011
• Most Influential Paper award at ICSE 2010
• Best Paper Award , Academy of Management (2010)

Similar researchers at Carnegie Mellon University

• Norman Sadehh-63
• Cleotilde (Coty) Gonzalezh-47