Hi! I’m a Senior Software Development Engineer at Amazon in Vancouver, BC, where I work on AI-native developer tooling. Before that, I spent four years on the high-availability services behind Amazon’s digital subscription businesses.

I completed my PhD at the University of Bergen’s Department of Informatics in 2021. My advisors were Dr. Anya Bagge and Prof. Gail Murphy. You can read more about my PhD here and find my thesis here.

My graduate research focused on helping humans edit programs. In my Master’s thesis, I used runtime verification to improve the safety of refactoring tools. In my PhD, I used user-oriented research methods, like interviews, surveys, and lab studies, to investigate how we can improve code editing tools. The goal of that research was to make it faster and easier for developers to change software.

News

• 2026 Senior Software Development Engineer at Amazon, now working on AI-native developer tooling.
• 2022 Started work as a Software Development Engineer at Amazon.
• 2021 Successfully defended my dissertation Improving the Usability of Refactoring Tools for Software Change Tasks!!
• 2021 Dissertation submitted!! 🤞🤞🤞.
• 2021 Our paper “Stepwise Refactoring Tools” is published along with a presentation!
• 2021 Our paper “A Study of Refactorings During Software Change Tasks” is out!
• 2021 Our paper “Stepwise Refactoring Tools” was accepted at the NIER Track at ICSME!
• 2021 NOKUT PhD Program Accreditation Committee
• 2021 “The Usability (or Not) of Refactoring Tools” presented at SANER 2021

Contact

• Email: anna.m.eilertsen@gmail.com
• LinkedIn: anna-eilertsen
• Google Scholar: Anna Maria Eilertsen
• GitHub: annaei
• Twitter: @annam_ei
• conf.researchr: annamariaeilertsen2

Research and teaching

I have experience with designing and executing user studies with programmer practitioners to understand how practitioners use tools. I have mined open source repositories to create refactoring tasks and online surveys. During my PhD, I built a prototype code editing/refactoring tool for IntelliJ, as well as prototype plugins for Eclipse (a refactoring plugin) and Visual Studio Code (a transcription plugin).

Aside from research activities, I have participated in initiatives for increased diversity in computer science. As an undergraduate, I started a gender initiative to retain more female students in our programming classes. I also took part in teaching activities at the University of Bergen for 7 years, including conducting lectures and creating tasks and exam exercises for classes of up to several hundred students. I have been an examiner for both oral and written exams, and I have supervised one Master’s student to graduation.

I have also been student volunteer, artifact reviewer, program committee member, and chair on various conferences.

Publications

• Dissertation: Improving the Usability of Refactoring Tools for Software Change Tasks
  by Anna Maria Eilertsen, University of Bergen, 2021
  Defense slides here

• “Stepwise Refactoring Tools” Access paper here
  by Anna Maria Eilertsen, Gail C. Murphy
  in ICSME 2021 NIER Track
  Presentation here

• “A Study of Refactorings During Software Change Tasks” Access paper here
  by Anna Maria Eilertsen, Gail C. Murphy
  in Journal of Software: Evolution and Process 36(1), 2024 (first published online in 2021)
  The full replication package and dataset from the study is published on Dataverse

• “The Usability (or Not) of Refactoring Tools” Access paper here
  by Anna Maria Eilertsen, Gail C. Murphy
  at SANER 2021
  Replication Package here
  PDF here

• “Predictable, Flexible or Correct: Trading off Refactoring Design Choices” Access paper here
  by Anna Maria Eilertsen
  at ICSEW’20: IWoR’20
  Presentation here
  Code examples here
  PDF here

• “Refactoring Operations Grounded in Manual Code Changes” Access paper here
  by Anna Maria Eilertsen
  at ICSE 2020 Doctoral Symposium (Companion Proceedings)
  PDF here

• “Exploring API/Client co-evolution” Access paper here
  by Anna Maria Eilertsen, Anya Helene Bagge
  at WAPI 2018
  PDF here

• “Safer refactorings” Access paper here
  by Anna Maria Eilertsen, Anya Helene Bagge, Volker Stolz
  in International Symposium on Leveraging Applications of Formal Methods (ISoLA 2016), 517-531
  PDF here

• “Nerding for Newbies 2014 A Summer School in Computers & Programming”
  by ML Bagge, AH Bagge, BN Buanes, AM Eilertsen, AK Herland, S Ivanova
  at Norsk Informatikkonferanse (NIK)
  PDF here

• “A Sage library for analysis of nonlinear binary mapping”
  by AM Eilertsen, O Kazymyrov, V Kazymyrova, M Storetvedt
  in Pre-proceedings of Central European Conference on Cryptology (CECC14), 69-78

Other interests

I get energy from

• swing dance
• hikes, camping and climbing
• boardgames