As a Cognitive Systems Engineer my job is to study complex work that is often fast paced and ambiguous with a high degree of uncertainty and time pressure. I use this research to design interfaces, interactions, and organizational systems that help support rapid sensemaking and effective collaboration across distributed teams. Over the last 6 years, I’ve studied DevOps engineers and I’ve noticed a gap in how we think about building tooling, designing work systems, and resourcing engineering teams. The gap is this: We don’t accurately account for the emotional aspects of software engineering.

After a rollercoaster year of layoffs, uncertainty, and stress there’s more than the regular old emotions to consider! This talk takes a resilience engineering lens to explore what DevOps might look like if we examine the interface between human factors, systems engineering, and the emotional experiences of software engineers.

In other words, what would DevEmoOps be?

Dr. Laura Maguire studies complex, high value work to aid in the design of more human-friendly tooling, processes, and work systems. Her work is both theoretical and practical and offers insights into