Zurich Empirical Software engineering Team

The mission of ZEST is to

1. understand how humans create, maintain, and evolve software systems,
2. produce knowledge to inform the design of methods and tools to increase the ability of software engineers to develop high-quality, trustworthy, and dependable software,
3. help humans better interact with code and collaborate when working on software,
4. educate the next generation of leaders in the software industries and communities.

We do this by engaging in interdisciplinary research and teaching. Our research work applies and advances empirical software engineering and draws from computer-supported cooperative work as well as social computing. Our teaching is evidence-based and focuses on providing hands-on experience with software systems development and maintenance.

Our broader vision is to move software engineering away from decisions based on intuition, development activities painstakingly conducted manually, and ineffective collaboration into solutions that are evidence-based, supported by the data routinely produced during software development, and informed by novel theories on how humans interact with code and fellow developers.

Donations (PDF, 12 MB) on behalf of the participants to our 2019-2021 studies.