The amount of autonomy in software engineering tools is increasing as developers build increasingly complex systems. We study factors influencing software engineers’ trust in an autonomous tool situated in a high stakes workplace, because research in other contexts shows that too much or too little trust in autonomous tools can have negative consequences. We present the results of a ten week ethnographic case study of engineers collaborating with an autonomous tool to write control software at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to support high stakes missions. We find that trust in an autonomous software engineering tool in this setting was influenced by four main factors: the tool’s transparency, usability, its social context, and the organization’s associated processes. Our observations lead us to frame trust as a quality the operator places in their collaboration with the automated system, and we outline implications of this framing and other results for researchers studying trust in autonomous systems, designers of software engineering tools, and organizations conducting high stakes work with these tools.

Many tasks call for efficient user interaction under time delay-controlling space instruments, piloting remote aircraft and operating search and rescue robots. In this paper we identify an underexplored design opportunity for building robotic teleoperation user interfaces following an evaluation of operator performance during a time-delayed robotic arm block-stacking task in twenty-two participants. More delay resulted in greater operator hesitation and a decreased ratio of active to inactive input. This ratio can serve as a useful proxy for measuring an operator's ability to anticipate the outcome of their control inputs before receiving delayed visual feedback. High anticipatory input ratio (AIR) scores indicate times when robot operators enter commands before waiting for visual feedback. Low AIR scores highlight when operators must wait for visual feedback before continuing. We used this measurement to help us identify particular sub-tasks where operators would likely benefit from additional support.

Historically, real-time strategy video games, such as Star-craft (1999) and Command and Conquer (1995), were intended to be played on desktop or laptop computers, with interfaces that afford the user dozens of keys and key combinations, mouse gestures including clicking and dragging, and several mouse buttons to further complicate the interface while allowing customization and a wide range of possibilities to the user. On a mobile multi-touch platform, there are constraints of limited visual real estate, which is actually shared with the touch command interface. Though work has been done to port real-time strategy games to the mobile platform, to date, there has not been a significant effort to enhance the usability of these interfaces by removing redundancies and tailoring the game commands to these multi-touch devices.