Sometimes, we humans find ourselves a bit slow to abandon the comfort of sitting "inside the box,” and this can detract from our ability to innovate. In this talk, I’ll share some outside-the-box perspectives, gleaned from decades of software engineering work, on boxes I’ve seen when thinking about bugs — from failures to faults, from finding to fixing, and from traditional to very non-traditional notions of “what counts” as a bug. I’ll consider the intellectually freeing perspectives that can come from moving outside the “mechanisms” box to policies; the enhancement to applicability from moving outside sub-sub-area boxes to the whole software lifecycle; the differences revealed when moving outside the “typical developer” box to diverse humans; and the plethora of possibilities arising from moving outside the “buggy code” box to a wide range of bug types.

Margaret Burnett’s research runs the gamut of human-centric aspects of developing software better. Together with her students and collaborators, she co-founded the area of end-user software engineering for both traditional software and for AI; brought information foraging theory to software tools that support today’s developers; and debunked the belief that software is gender-neutral, inventing methods to eradicate software’s gender-inclusivity “bugs”. Her work has impacted commercial software used by millions of people.

Burnett is a University Distinguished Professor in the School of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at Oregon State University. She holds 4 patents; has received 10 best paper awards/honorable mentions and 5 Long-Term Impact awards; and has received multiple mentoring, service, and research awards. She is an ACM Fellow, and was elected to ACM’s CHI Academy in 2016 as one of the “principal leaders of the field” of HCI. In 2022, she received IEEE’s TCSE Distinguished Women in Science and Engineering Award, for outstanding and sustained contributions to the software engineering community.