Welcome to our Blog!
Who are we?
We are a software engineering research group in the Department of Computer Science at Virginia Tech. We are a diverse team using empirical methods, interdisciplinary concepts, and automated tools to improve the behavior, productivity, decision-making of software engineers. Our group has published papers in a variety of venues related to SE, HCI, NLP, Blockchain, CS education, and more. More details about are available here.
Dr. Chris Brown, an Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Virginia Tech, leads this research group and is the primary contributor to this blog. A native of Rock Hill, SC, Chris obtained his BS (Duke, 2013), MS (NC State, 2017), and PhD (NC State, 2021) degrees in Computer Science. He has industry experiences at Bank of America (2013-2015), Blackbaud (2016), and Red Hat (2017, 2018). He also has previous blogging experience, writing about Duke athletics 😈. Chris joined Virginia Tech in Fall 2021, and lives in Blacksburg, VA with his family.
Why start this blog?
This blog is motivated by recent discussions with colleagues and position papers (i.e., [Winters2024], [Wyrich2025], etc.) outlining the increasing gap between SE research and practice. Just publishing papers is not enough---for research to make an actual impact on software development in practice, more efforts are needed.
This blog is a first step to improve the awareness, relevance, and potential impact of our research. We will provide regular communication about our work, aiming to engage with researchers and practitioners on research and general software development-related topics. If you would like to contribute, collaborate, or donate, please feel free to reach out via email.
Acknowledgements
Thank you to the all of exceptional students who have contributed to these research efforts.
This blog template (Marmite) was created by Bruno Rocha, my former colleague at Red Hat.
References
[Winters2024]: T. Winters. Thoughts on applicability. Journal of Systems and Software, 2024.
[Wyrich2025]: M. Wyrich, C. Tinnes, S. Baltes, and S. Apel. The Silent Scientist When Software Research Fails to Reach Its Audience. 2025.