Roy Rutishauser

Research Assistant

Short Bio

I am a Ph.D. student at the University of Zurich since February 2021, and I am supervised by Prof. Thomas Fritz.

My research currently focuses on how developers manage information from the web – how they consume, store, and rediscover it and how they can best share it with others.

I received my master’s degree in Computer Science at the University of Zurich in 2019.

Teaching

I co-organise the Software Engineering Lab. It takes place each spring (FS20, FS21, FS22, FS23).

Project Supervision

I enjoy working with students on exciting projects. Here is a selected list of completed theses:

Master Project “Expectation Management“, co-supervision with André Meyer
Bachelor Thesis: “Emotional Awareness“, co-supervision with André Meyer
Bachelor Thesis: “Stuck Detector“, co-supervision with Alexander Lill

I am regularly looking for new students. Some projects can be found here. If you can’t find a topic that suits you, I am happy to discuss new ideas, too.

Address	University of Zurich Department of Informatics Binzmühlestrasse 14 CH-8050 Zurich, Switzerland
Email	rutis@ifi.uzh.ch
Office	BIN 2.B.17

Selected Publications

Research Assistant

Semi-Automatic, Inline and Collaborative Web Page Code Curations

Software developers spend about a quarter of their workday using the web to fulfill various information needs. Searching for relevant information online can be time-consuming, yet acquired information is rarely systematically persisted for later reference. In this work, we introduce SALI, an approach for semi-automated linking web pages to source code locations inline with the source code. SALI helps developers naturally capture high-quality, explicit links between web pages and specific source code locations by suggesting links for curation within the IDE. Through two laboratory studies, we examined the developer’s ability to both curate and consume links between web pages and specific source code locations while performing software development tasks. The studies were performed with 20 subjects working on realistic software change tasks from widely-used open-source projects. Results showed that developers continuously and concisely curate web pages at meaningful locations in the code with little effort. Additionally, we showed that other developers could use these curations while performing new and different change tasks to speed up relevant information gathering within unfamiliar codebases by a factor of 2.4.