Matthew Davis Software Engineering PhD Candidate
Software and Societal Systems Department
School of Computer Science
Carnegie Mellon University
Pittsburgh, PA, USA

Office: TCS Hall

Research

I am a Software Engineering PhD candidate co-advised by Dr. Brad A. Myers and Dr. Joshua Sunshine. I reside in the Software and Societal Systems Department (S3D) and work on multi-disciplinary projects across S3D, HCII, Cylab, and RI.

Software engineers are users, too! My research focuses on improving the human ability to build and test useful software. I move my research agenda forward with both empirical and theoretical methods that center on human studies of professional software engineers. As a result of this research, I lead teams of students in the design and engineering of state-of-the-art human-focused tools, such as the NaNofuzz automatic test suite generator.

I publish and speak at top venues in software engineering, such as FSE, ICSE, and TOSEM, and give invited talks about software test automation, engineer-focused tool development, and how researchers can use their empirical work as a springboard to theoretical research. Reach out if you need an interesting speaker at your seminar or lab meeting.

Bio

My industry experience encompasses more than twenty years building and operating critical software systems, which includes requirements, architecture, design, construction, testing, QA, project management, communication, negotiation, integration, life-cycle management, and managing geographically distributed infrastructure and teams, including software engineers. My experience encompasses many important SE-adjacent aspects required to deliver and manage critical software systems, such as datacenter infrastructure, compute, storage, power, environmental, disaster recovery, physical and cybersecurity, cloud, identity management, procurement, LAN, WAN, MAN, delivery controllers, user support, M&A, budgeting, service and process management, vendor management, and telecom.

My experience includes startup roles and bringing new products to market. For instance, I led the software side of the product development team at Corning that helped Verizon scale its early Fios rollout by several orders of magniture such that Verizon Fios is now available at over 17 million physical locations across 9 US states and generated nearly $12.89 billion USD in revenue for Verizon in its FY’2024. This software product was a key ingredient in our “secret sauce” that made Verizon successful in its market while also making our own product solution particularly difficult for Verizon to replace. A different type of example: if you saw Duck Brand bubble-gum scented duct tape at Wal-Mart or Amazon and wondered whose idea that was, that was my idea, and getting that product from concept to a retail shelf required a diverse team of material scientists, manufacturing engineers, product marketers, logistics experts, procurement folks, and salespeople. Some people like to call their projects “moonshots.” I have worked on a literal moonshot project, Iris Lunar Rover, that put our robot into space and (almost) onto the moon’s surface on a shoestring budget. My career is about running toward the hard projects and then getting them done.

Papers and Publications

Teaching

  • 17-950: Principles of Software Construction. Spring, 2024. Head TA. Lead recitations and selected lectures. In this doctoral class, I helped non-CS PhD students learn how to build, test, and deploy software such as tools and research data pipelines.
  • 17-214/514: Principles of Software Construction. Spring, 2023. Head TA. Seven sections, >100 students (mix of graduate and undergraduate), two instructors, and a team of 13 TAs. Among office hours, recitations, and lectures, this class offered up to 37 hours of total student contact each week. As head TA and in collaboration with the instructors, I revised the course schedule, helped select TAs, setup class infrastructure (e.g., Canvas, GradeScope, Piazza, GitHub, GitHub Classroom), managed TA schedules, ran staff meetings, managed and QA’d grading, coordinated recitation and homework updates, answered student questions, implemented a replacement homework based on previous course feedback, created exam questions, and ordered amazing hoodies for our fantastic TAs.

Funding Awards

Service

  • Research Experience for Undergraduates in Software Engineering (REUSE) admissions and mentor, 2022-2025.
  • Student Organizer, PLATEAU Workshop 2021-2025.
  • DEFCON 31 Generative AI Red Team / AI Village Student Volunteer, 2023.
  • Department Marketing and Communications Advisory Panel, 2023.
  • Department Faculty Committee student representative, 2023-2025.
  • Usable Testing Reading Group coordinator, 2022-2023.

Projects

  • NaNofuzz (or TerzoN) is an automatic test suite generator for Typescript that is designed with a developer’s attention and usability in mind. NaNofuzz is currently available for download in the VS Code Marketplace.
  • Penrose uses domain-specific languages and complex mathematics to generate beautiful diagrams. Its home is at Carnegie Mellon University, and I primarily worked on the renderer and a prototype semantic debugger for the style language. Try it out!
  • Iris Lunar Rover was a student-run space robotics project that pur our robot into space during the winter of 2023-2024 via ULA’s new Vulcan rocket and Astrobotic’s Peregrine lander. I served in mission control telemetry and systems operator for the rover while also running the project website and part of its social media presence. Our ride to the moon, the Peregrine lander, began to leak fuel shortly after separation from Vulcan’s upper stage. We successfully operated Iris in space and orbited the moon. However, Peregrine’s fuel leak prevented a safe descent to the lunar surface.
  • PURSE was a multi-university collaboration to identify and lower barriers researchers encounter when planning and running programmer user studies. The goal was to advance the field of software engineering by increasing the amount and quality of direct evidence available to software engineering researchers. We published an article in ToSEM, “What’s (not) Working in Programmer User Studies?,” that reports many of our findings.

A subset of past projects includes:

  • An experimental snapshot memory facility within the HotSpot JVM.
  • Security remediation suggestion system ingesting feeds from multiple sensors and data sources to direct action amd focus the attention of diverse software and infrastructure teams.
  • Configure, Price, and Quote (CPQ) systems for complex telecom products, including a highly-configurable product pricing engine with a novel user interface that allowed pricing analysts to speak to the system in terms they were used to.
  • Automated consignment management system. Ingested a diverse set of material movement signals from across North America to bill and plan fillups and returns according to location-specific contract terms. This system utilized an accessible and lightweight rules engine allowing users to easily update contract terms to allow timely, accurate, and automated processing of physical and fiscal transactions.
  • Many (usually unnamed) infrastructure automation tools and projects to reduce human toil and human error.
  • Several hundred large-scale global enterprise software system integrations among a complex web of Fortune 500 customers, manufacturers, vendors, 3PLs, financial institutions, and service providers using a combination of off-the-shelf and custom-developed software, whichever was most appropriate.
  • Multiple full-cycle global SAP implementations across various modules and industries inclusive of integrations.
  • EAMON, a web-based and extensible re-imagination of Don Brown’s classic Apple ][ RPG that included a graphical user interface for building dungeons, traps, monsters, and so on. Several original Apple ][ EAMON modules were ported to this system.
  • SiteDrive, A lightweight flexible content management system used by a variety of small companies and non-profits in the early 2000s.
  • McList, a mailing list processor reviewed favorably by c’t magazine in 1997 and used by the Ontario Ministry of Housing as well as other global clients for many years.
  • stree, which was ranked #8 best online utility by a Japanese-language IDG publication in 1999.
  • McD-CBV, a popular call-back verifier for AdeptXBBS.
  • Mail Center Professional, a multi-protocol email server.
  • And so on…

Education

I am a Software Engineering PhD candidate at Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Computer Science. My GPA at CMU is 4.0, and I am co-advised by Dr. Brad A. Myers and Dr. Joshua Sunshine.

Prior to CMU, I spent time at North Carolina State University as a non-degree-seeking student in the Mathematics Department. My GPA at NCSU was 4.0. Prior to that, I completed my Masters of Science in Software Engineering at East Carolina University’s Department of Computer Science under the supervision of Dr. Mark Hills, who is now at Appalacian State University. My GPA at ECU was 4.0. My undergraduate work was completed in Lenoir-Rhyne University’s Computer Science Department under the advisement of Richard Hull.