Arty Starr : ☮️ :starrgirl.eth

@art3starr
562 Followers
714 Following
1.4K Posts
Artist & animator, software engineer, constructivist grounded theory researcher, and spiritually-rooted mystic. Bringing together a wide range of skills into a fusion of creativity, and trying to make the world a better place through my projects.
Personal website and portfoliohttps://artystarr.com
My Bookhttps://leanpub.com/ideaflow
My Artworkhttps://oncyber.io/artemis-handpaintings
My Whyhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4NPArs4eR3c

@art3starr @RuthMalan @donaldegray @roundcrisis Hi Arty... I just read your paper, I'm very impressed.

As a (now-retired) software dev who did a lot of troubleshooting / debugging in my career, and tried to think carefully about the process, I found the model you ended up with mapped quite closely to my own experiences and my own (much less well thought-out) approach to explaining troubleshooting to others.

#PapersInSystems, June 1 (Monday), 2pm Eastern: Scaffolding Conversations (see upthread) with @donaldegray and @roundcrisis

PapersInSystems, July 8 (yes, Wednesday), 1pm Eastern:
“Theory of Troubleshooting” by Arty Starr and Margaret-Anne Storey, and discussion will be led by @art3starr (Arty Starr)

https://ti.to/bredemeyer/theory-of-troubleshooting

Papers in Systems Discussion: Theory of Troubleshooting

Theory of Troubleshooting Next in our Papers in Systems discussion series: “Theory of Troubleshooting” by Arty Starr and Margaret-Anne Storey. The discussion will be led by Arty Starr. When: July 8, 2026, 1PM - 2PM Eastern Time (US/Canada) (19:00 CEST). The Zoom room will remain open until 2:30PM (ET) for informal discussion. (Check time in your timezone: WorldTimeBuddy ) The official link to the paper is: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3800945 (and you are encouraged to download it from that ACM link, for academic credit reasons). If that is hard to read due to the watermark, you can also download it here: https://arxiv.org/abs/2602.10540 The importance of this paper is all the greater, as pressures increase, and more code is generated, and generated faster, and the need to communicate Developer Experience in ways that resonate, is of such great consequence. Some quotes to tease the appetite: "the Theory of Troubleshooting that followed from our analysis: the cognitive problem-solving process of identifying, understanding, and constructing a mental model of the cause of an unexpected system behavior." "While cognitive fatigue has been widely studied in domains outside software development [1], research within this context remains limited. One exception is a survey by Sarkar and Parnin (n=311), which found that a majority of developers experience severe and frequent issues with cognitive fatigue [35]. Their findings highlight the need to better understand the cognitive demands placed on developers and how they contribute to fatigue. In software development, such demands are not evenly distributed across activities. Troubleshooting, in particular, places sustained demands on attention, working memory, and mental modeling, as developers work to reconcile unexpected system behavior with their existing understanding." "What makes the developer’s process troubleshooting is not the presence of a bug, but rather the developer’s engagement in a cognitive process of trying to understand unexpected behavior. These are related, but oriented differently: one reflects a condition of the code, the other a shift in the developer’s cognitive activity" "As developers strive to make sense of a confusing system behavior, they also draw on a “gut feel” intuition that guides their strategy, shaping where they look and how they begin. This intuitive sense—what we call experiential intuition—is a tacit form of knowing shaped by accumulated experience (expertise), in which perceived similarities to past situations provide a felt sense of direction, even before a clear rationale has formed."

Tito
@art3starr I am so excited for everyone — it’ll be *wonderful*

@RuthMalan @art3starr I moved a pebble at the top of the hill. Arty and the team have done the hard work.

If your thinking feels stuck, I hope you gift us 3 hours of your time tomorrow.

🌈 Hi everyone! We are in the final stretch for Thinkies World Congress II on May 20th!

https://www.eventbrite.com/e/thinkies-world-congress-ii-tickets-1987938370179?aff=oddtdtcreator

Thinkies are a creative thinking tool designed by @kentbeck that can help you shift a stuck frame, spark new ideas, and expand the space of options when making decisions.

We’ve trained up 12 Thinkies mentors and 31 Thinkies facilitators that crafted sticky scenarios for 200 people to come try out a Thinkie. There are free ticket options too.

We'd love for you to come. 💜

Thinkies World Congress II

Stuck in predictable thinking grooves? Join Thinkies World Congress II, May 20, to practice creative tools for generating fresh ideas.

Eventbrite

May 20th: @kentbeck ‘s Thinkies World Congress

“Thinkies are a creative thinking tool designed by Kent Beck that can help you shift a stuck frame, spark new ideas, and expand the space of options when making decisions. They are surprisingly useful little thinking tricks and very worth learning and experiencing for yourself.”

@art3starr

Enroll/info: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/thinkies-world-congress-ii-tickets-1987938370179

(pay if you can; no pay option if money is hard right now)

Thinkies World Congress II

Stuck in predictable thinking grooves? Join Thinkies World Congress II, May 20, to practice creative tools for generating fresh ideas.

Eventbrite
@art3starr it is!! And we should talk about having this be a focus of one the Papers In Systems discussions, if that works for you! (The discussion you and Margeret-Anne Storey led was wonderful and memorable — great teaming, insights, facilitating thoughtful discussion)

“One of the most overlooked hidden costs and long-term risks on software projects is the rising cognitive cost of troubleshooting. As software systems evolve, they often grow in complexity—accumulating dependencies, behaviors, and design decisions that can become harder to reason about over time. Maintaining a system requires that developers can make sense of unexpected behavior when it occurs.”

@art3starr

https://artystarr.com/blog/giving-developers-words

Giving Developers Words to Explain What's Happening When Software Gets Out of Control

The lack of visibility and difficulty of quantifying the challenges make it hard to communicate the severity of the situation to management, which often prevents the investment of time and resources in improvements.

Hi Everyone!

I’m excited to share that I just had a paper accepted in ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM) co-authored with @mastorey , where we present a grounded theory, rooted in cognitive science, of the developer’s cognitive experience of troubleshooting and overcoming confusion.

Our theory 𝗴𝗶𝘃𝗲𝘀 𝗱𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗹𝗼𝗽𝗲𝗿𝘀 𝘄𝗼𝗿𝗱𝘀 𝘁𝗼 𝗲𝘅𝗽𝗹𝗮𝗶𝗻 𝘄𝗵𝗮𝘁’𝘀 𝗵𝗮𝗽𝗽𝗲𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝘄𝗵𝗲𝗻 𝘀𝗼𝗳𝘁𝘄𝗮𝗿𝗲 𝘀𝘆𝘀𝘁𝗲𝗺𝘀 𝗴𝗲𝘁 𝗼𝘂𝘁 𝗼𝗳 𝗰𝗼𝗻𝘁𝗿𝗼𝗹—𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗹𝗲𝗮𝗱𝘀 𝘁𝗼 𝗽𝗿𝗮𝗰𝘁𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗮𝗱𝘃𝗶𝗰𝗲 𝗳𝗼𝗿 𝗶𝗺𝗽𝗿𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁.

https://artystarr.com/blog/giving-developers-words

Leading tech teams in the age of AI requires more than new tools—it requires new
thinking.💡

Join @bsletten at Arc of AI for a deep dive
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