Elspeth Golden (Elsa), HCII . (Advisors, Bonnie John, Len Bass) Elsa received a B.A. in History (cum laude) from the University of California at Santa Barbara . Her professional background is in commercial software development, and her ultimate goal is to improve quality of life, both personal and professional, as well as competitive capability, for professional software engineers and architects. She hopes to achieve this by developing methods and techniques that will help software engineering to more closely approach the standards of other engineering disciplines, and by finding ways to effectively teach such methods to software engineering students and professionals.

At present, Elsa is working on the Usability and Software Architecture (U&SA) project in HCII. Her research focuses on developing methods to help software architects address usability concerns, and on finding ways to effectively teach such methods to software engineers and architects. A experiment she performed during the summer shows promising initial results in this direction, and she and her colleagues continue to move forward with further analysis and experimentation.

Elsa is excited about PIER because she views it as a great opportunity to expand her work in an important and interesting direction, without abandoning her current research or leaving her home department. She is convinced that one of the great fallacies of innovation is, “Build it and they will come.” Instead, she believes that in order to convince professionals in an emergent discipline such as software engineering to use new methods and tools, we will have to know how to teach effectively to this particular population. She is excited about working on this problem!

People would be surprised to know that Elsa used to sing lead, write songs, and play rhythm guitar in a folk-rock band in San Francisco .