Software Engineering Research & Conference Talks
I’ve been a software engineer for 20+ years, and that shapes a lot of my perspective—especially when it comes to what problems I aim to solve with my research. I’ve had the privilege of working with incredibly talented peers, and I’m grateful for the wisdom picked up along the way. I bring a career’s worth of industry experience to my research.
One major thread across my research, talks, and writing is an effort to help developers explain the challenges they face as software systems become increasingly complex. Especially now, with the influx of AI tools—we can feel our cognitive experience shifting, but it's not exactly clear how it is shifting, because we haven't had theoretical models for this.
Another major thread is reframing what we aim for, unflattening "productivity" to make room for what we really want, and creating space for a vision of thriving. We can build organizations with high-performing teams that are sustainable, joyful, and effective at the same time.
Research Publications
[2025] Fuzzy to clear: Elucidating the threat hunter cognitive process and cognitive support needs—
Alessandra Maciel Paz Milani, Arty Starr, Samantha Hill, Callum Curtis, Norman Anderson,
David MorenoLumbreras, Margaret-Anne Storey. Published in Computers & Security.
[2025] Cyberspace Vigilante or Security Sleuth: Understanding Who Threat Hunters Are — Samantha Hill, Alessandra Maciel Paz Milani, Callum Curtis, Arty Starr, Enrique Larios-Vargas, Marcus Dunn, Margaret-Anne Storey.
Published in 2025 IEEE/ACM 6th International Workshop on Engineering and Cybersecurity of Critical Systems (EnCyCriS).
[2023] Understanding Threat Hunting Personas— Samantha Hill, Alessandra Maciel Paz Milani, Callum Curtis, Arty Starr, Enrique Larios Vergas, Marcus Dunn, Margaret-Anne Storey. Published with University of Victoria library.
[2024] BridgesSummit— Arty Starr, Margaret-Anne Storey, Keith Mann, Peter Pavlovich,
Justin Reock, Vincent Mayers
We invited research and software industry communities together for an "unconference experience"— to meet in a virtual space as a community and have generative conversations about important topics. For our first summit, we centered the conversation around reframing "developer productivity", asking what it is we're truly aiming for, and proposing the Bridges Triangle of Developer Experience, Software Excellence, and Thriving as a starting point for discussion. We had such an amazing group of people come to this event—it was really quite special. We put a lot of care into summarizing the rich insights and wisdom that came out of the community discussions, which you'll see in the industry publications below.
Watch Trailer
[2025] Thinkies World Congress— Kent Beck, Arty Starr, Wisen Tanasa, Carlo Gimar,
Blake Lindsay, Mario Melo, and Bruno Monteiro
A Creative Gathering for Unsticking Stuck Thinking. Thinkies are learnable pattern transformations you can use to shift how you see a situation, expand the space of options, and spark new ideas, especially when things feel stuck or prematurely decided. It’s not about having the right idea, it’s about generating lots of ideas—some of which might be brilliant. At the Thinkies World Congress virtual event, you won’t just learn about Thinkies, you’ll get practice with them.
Watch Trailer
[2017] Idea Flow: How to Measure the Pain in Software Development (Arty's Book)
A modern strategy for systematically optimizing software productivity with a data-driven feedback loop. By measuring the pain or “friction” in developer experience, we can identify the biggest problems, understand the causes, and run experiments to systematically learn what works. It's data-driven software mastery.
Read
[2025] Reframing "Productivity": What are we aiming for?
After organizing our first Bridges Summit conference, we distilled key themes from community discussions. This first article discusses the problems and constraints that keep us from bridging the divide between developers and management, research and industry, and the challenges to Developer Experience.
Read
[2025] Dimensions of Software Excellence
This second article summarizing key themes from Bridges Summit community discussions explores the lens of Software Excellence and what we miss when we become overly focused on Developer Experience.
Read
[2025] Building Cultures that Invite Contribution: A Blueprint for Thriving Teams
This third article summarizing key themes from Bridges Summit community discussions explores the lens of Thriving and synthesizes insights from the conference into an actionable blueprint and strategy.
Read
FlowInsight
Hand-crafted developer console tools that integrate into the developer's everyday workflow, helping you get in flow and get momentum going more easily. There's a little purple light that gets brighter purple as you get into coding, and purple stars and animated fervie celebrations when you get stuff done—just to make life a little more fun. The data visualizations and reflection tools help you shift your paradigm to notice patterns of momentum and troubleshooting. For example, noticing how patterns of troubleshooting difficulty arise in your particular code base and experiences, or how the timing of meetings affects your ability to get momentum going and sustain momentum across days.
We're looking for teams interested in being part of a design science research project and pilot with the tools, so please reach out if you're interested!
Visit Site
[2021] Arty's Keynote on "Flow" at Spring One. During the pandemic, when many big conferences went fully online, VMWare went the extra mile with production and I had the chance to do a short keynote in front of 20k people, which really got me thinking about what I wanted to say.
Watch
[2019] The Ultimate Metric. YOW! Australia. Since the dawn of software development, we've struggled with a huge disconnect between the management world and the engineering world. We try to explain our problems in terms of "technical debt", but somehow the message seems to get lost in translation, and we drive our projects into the ground, over and over again. What if we could detect the earliest indicators of a project going off the rails, and had data to convince management to take action? What if we could bridge this communication gap once and for all?
Watch
[2023] Enabling Powerful Software Insights by Visualizing Friction and Flow. GDG Southlake. In an Agile software development process, a software team will typically meet in a "retrospective meeting" to reflect on challenges and opportunities for improvement. On the surface, this might seem straight-forward, but identifying what’s most important in a complex sociotechnical system is a task humans struggle to do well. What if developers had tools that helped them explore their historical experiences with the code, and could identify hotspots of team friction, worthy of discussion, based on empirical data? This talk will explore that possibility with a working prototype of an Augmented Reality (AR) Code Planetarium powered by FlowInsight developer tools.
Watch
[2019] Anatomy of Communication. ExploreDDD. In its essence, Domain-Driven Design is a philosophy and set of techniques for constructing a shared mental model of a system and translating it into the software. Ideally, we want conversations with other humans, and conversations with our code, to have the highest possible bandwidth. Every major problem in software development boils down to communication. Arty wonders: What if we enabled a dialog around the challenges, by first deconstructing the Anatomy of Communication itself using our same DDD techniques?
Watch
[2024] Ready Set Flow - A Conversation in Momentum and Troubleshooting with Arty Starr
Building with People for People: The Unfiltered Build Podcast with Nigel Finley and Gabriel Levasseur.
Listen
[2023] Developers Thriving in the Flow with Arty Starr
Happy Path Programming with Bruce Eckel and James Ward.
Listen
[2019] Idea Flow with Arty Starr
Legacy Code Rocks with Andrea Goulet and M. Scott Ford
Listen
[2024] Fostering Developer Flow, Thriving, and Excellence with Arty Starr
Article by Nigel Finley
Read
[2024] The most underrated book in software engineering management
Article by Eric Normand
Read