The Open University

Professional biography

Tamara Lopez graduated from Northern Arizona University with a degree in Theatre Performance. She spent the next 14 years working in industry as a web developer and within universities as a research software engineer on digital humanities projects.

During her time in industry, Tamara worked in Chicago, Illinois, building first-generation websites for local businesses and community organisations including Howard Brown Health Center; in San Francisco as a front-end engineer at the Snap.com portal; and in Dublin, Ireland as a member of the web booking development team at Aer Lingus. As a research software engineer, she worked at Indiana University and King's College in London on leading digital humanities projects including The Chymistry of Isaac Newton and the Fine Rolls of Henry III.

Tamara earned a Master of Information Science and a Master of Library Science from Indiana University in 2006 and she completed a PhD at the Open University in 2016 under the supervision of Marian Petre and Bashar Nuseibeh. Her doctoral research examined how professional developers handle errors that come up in everyday practice.

Current Projects

Co-Investigator on STRIDE, a project examining the relationship between socio-technical resilience and automation (EP/T017465/1).
Post-doctoral research associate on Motivating Jenny, a project that has investigated ways to initiate and sustain secure software culture among developers who are not experts in security.
Named researcher on SAUSE: Secure, adaptive, usable software engineering (EP/R013144/1)

Research interests

Following my training in the theatre arts and time spent as a professional, the research approach I take within software engineering is humanistic, grounded in qualitative methods.

I critically engage with prevalent concepts in software engineering research and trade sources to identify questions and develop interdisciplinary analytic frameworks that permit empirical, naturalistic examination of professional practice. My aim is two-fold:

To examine software engineering as a form of world-making, in which developers, like other people, define and create significant spaces with one another through their activities, ideas, language and materials.
To situate findings within frameworks and outputs that illuminate how cooperative, human aspects of software development support engineering practice in the workplace.

Externally funded projects

Socio-technical resilience in software development (STRIDE)

Role	Start date	End date	Funding source
Co-investigator	01 Jul 2020	30 Sep 2025	EPSRC Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council
The project will investigate resilience and automation in the socio-technical system that supports software development, which includes people , technical infrastructure, processes and artefacts . Recognising that users are developers and developers are users in different contexts, we’d like to investigate two communities that represent different points along that dimension: commercial software development community and professional end user development community.

Publications

Journal articles

Security Responses in Software Development (2023-04-26)
Lopez, Tamara; Sharp, Helen; Bandara, Arosha; Thein, Tun; Levine, Mark and Nuseibeh, Bashar
ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, 32, Article 64(3)

The Case for Adaptive Security Interventions (2022-01)
Rauf, Irum; Petre, Marian; Tun, Thein; Lopez, Tamara; Lunn, Paul; Van der Linden, Dirk; Towse, John; Sharp, Helen; Levine, Mark; Rashid, Awais and Nuseibeh, Bashar
ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, 31, Article 9(1)

Industry-Academia Research Collaborations During and After COVID-19 (2021-10)
Marijan, Dusica; Bansal, Chetan and Lopez, Tamara
ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes, 46(4) (pp. 19-22)

Bumps in the Code: Error Handling during Software Development (2021-05)
Lopez, Tamara; Sharp, Helen; Petre, Marian and Nuseibeh, Bashar
IEEE Software, 38(3) (pp. 26-34)

Taking the Middle Path: Learning about Security Through Online Social Interaction (2020-01-01)
Lopez, Tamara; Tun, Thein; Bandara, Arosha; Levine, Mark; Nuseibeh, Bashar and Sharp, Helen
IEEE Software, 37(1) (pp. 25-30)

Conference items

Co-Designing Resilient Socio-Technical Software Systems (2024-07-25)
Lopez, Tamara; Sharp, Helen and Wermelinger, Michel
In : 2024 International Workshop on Designing Software (Designing ’24) (14-15 Apr 2024, Lisbon, Portugal) (pp. 60-63)

Meet your Maker: A Social Identity Analysis of Robotics Software Engineering (2023-07-11)
Gavidia-Calderon, Carlos; Bennaceur, Amel; Lopez, Tamara; Kordoni, Anastasia; Levine, Mark and Nuseibeh, Bashar
In : TAS '23 First International Symposium on Trustworthy Autonomous Systems (11-12 Jul 2023, Edinburgh, United Kingdom)

Security Thinking in Online Freelance Software Development (2023)
Rauf, Irum; Petre, Marian; Tun, Thein; Lopez, Tamara and Nuseibeh, Bashar
In : IEEE/ACM 45th International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Society (ICSE-SEIS) (14-20 May 2023, Melbourne, Australia) (pp. 13-24)

Accounting for socio-technical resilience in software engineering (2023)
Lopez, Tamara; Sharp, Helen; Wermelinger, Michel; Langer, Melanie; Levine, Mark; Jay, Caroline; Yu, Yijun and Nuseibeh, Bashar
In : 2023 IEEE/ACM 16th International Conference on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering (CHASE) (14-15 May 2023, Melbourne)

Informed consent and participant recruitment in studies of software practice (2022-05)
Sharp, Helen; Lopez, Tamara and Wermelinger, Michel
In : 1st International Workshop on Recruiting Participants for Empirical Software Engineering (RoPES’22) (17 May 2022, Virtual)

Influences of developers' perspectives on their engagement with security in code (2022-05)
Rauf, Irum; Lopez, Tamara; Sharp, Helen; Petre, Marian; Tun, Thein; Levine, Mark; Towse, John; Linden, Dirk van der; Rashid, Awais and Nuseibeh, Bashar
In : 15th International Conference on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering (CHASE) (CHASE 2022) (18-19 May 2022, USA) (pp. 86-95)

Challenges of Recruiting Developers in Multidisciplinary Studies (2022)
Rauf, Irum; Lopez, Tamara; Sharp, Helen and Petre, Marian
In : 1st International Workshop on Recruiting Participants for Empirical Software Engineering (RoPES’22) (17 May 2022, Virtual)

Message from the Chairs (2021-06-04)
Marijan, D.; Bansal, C. and Lopez, T.
In : 8th IEEE/ACM International Workshop on Software Engineering Research and Industrial Practice, SER and IP 2021 (4 Jun 2021, Online) (pp. 7-7)

An Anatomy of Security Conversations in Stack Overflow (2019-08-15)
Lopez, Tamara; Tun, Thein; Bandara, Arosha; Levine, Mark; Nuseibeh, Bashar and Sharp, Helen
In : 41st ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering (25 May - 1 Jun 2019, Montréal, Canada) (pp. 31-40)

Talking about Security with Professional Developers (2019-05-28)
Lopez, Tamara; Sharp, Helen; Tun, Thein; Bandara, Arosha; Levine, Mark and Nuseibeh, Bashar
In : 7th International Workshop Series on Conducting Empirical Studies in Industry (CESSER-IP) (28 May 2019, Montréal, Canada)

Hopefully We Are Mostly Secure: Views on Secure Code in Professional Practice (2019-05-27)
Lopez, Tamara; Sharp, Helen; Tun, Thein; Bandara, Arosha; Levine, Mark and Nuseibeh, Bashar
In : 12th International Workshop on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering (CHASE) (27 May 2019, Montréal, Canada) (pp. 61-68)

An Investigation of Security Conversations in Stack Overflow: Perceptions of Security and Community Involvement (2018)
Lopez, Tamara; Tun, Thein T.; Bandara, Arosha; Levine, Mark; Nuseibeh, Bashar and Sharp, Helen
In : First International Workshop on Security Awareness from Design to Deployment (SEAD'18) (27 May 2018, Gothenburg) (pp. 26-32)

Examining Active Error in Software Development (2016-11-10)
Lopez, Tamara; Petre, Marian and Nuseibeh, Bashar
In : 2016 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC) (4-8 Sep 2016, Cambridge, UK) (pp. 152-156)

Getting at ephemeral flaws (2012-06)
Lopez, Tamara; Petre, Marian and Nuseibeh, Bashar
In : Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering (CHASE), 2012 5th International Workshop on (2 Jun 2012, Zurich)

Thesis

Error Detection and Recovery in Software Development (2016-12-21)
Lopez, Tamara
PhD thesis The Open University

Other

Studying Things that Go Wrong in Software Development [Probation Report] (2012-02-09)
Lopez, Tamara
Department of Computing, The Open University

Faculty of Science, Technology, Engineering & Mathematics

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