Research at Multitudes

Read our original research on developer productivity and wellbeing, co-authored and published with leading industry thought-leaders.

arXiv

Alessandra Maciel Paz Milani, Margaret-Anne Storey, Vivek Katial, and Lauren Peate

Exploring Retrospective Meeting Practices and the Use of Data in Agile Teams

March 1, 2025

View the paper

Mining Software Repositories Conference

Lauren Peate

Measure what matters and don't be creepy: The ethics of using data about people

2021

Watch the talk Read more

International Network for Social Network Analysis Sunbelt Conference

Jenny Sahng, Vivek Katial

Workplace well-being & collaboration within software engineering teams via networks of feedback from digital activity

2022

View the presentation

Meet our research team and collaborators

Because we care about transparency and accountability, we work with independent academics – our collaborators don’t have a vested interest in Multitudes so they’re free to give their unbiased opinions.

Lauren Peate

Founder, CEO, Multitudes

Lauren studied Economics at Stanford, with a focus on econometrics and statistical analysis. As a Fullbright Scholar, she has previously conducted original research in Morocco. Lauren has previous experience as a consultant at Bain & Co.

Vivek Katiel

Lead Data Scientist, Multitudes

Vivek has recently submitted his PhD in Quantum Computing at the University of Melbourne, Australia. He is also the Executive Director at The Good Data Institute.

Dr. Margaret-Anne Story

Co-author of SPACE and DevEx,
Professor at University of Victoria

Professor of Computer Science and a Canada Research Chair in Human and Social Aspects of Software Engineering.

Alessandra Maciel Paz Milani

PhD Candidate

Alessandra has 15+ years of experience in software engineering. Her research topics of interest are related to data science, particularly information visualization.

Dr. Kelly Blincoe

University of Auckland, HASEL Lab

Rutherford Discovery Fellow and an Associate Professor of Software Engineering. Kelly leads the ENGclusion research programme.

University of Victoria

Collaborated with the the Computer Human Interaction & Software Engineering Lab (CHISEL) at the University of Victoria

University of Melbourne

Collaborating with the School of Computing and Information Systems and the School of Mathematics and Statistics on existing research.

University of Auckland

Collaborated with the Human Aspects of Software Engineering Lab (HASEL), University of Auckland

Active areas of research

Taking action on data

We would like to help teams to go beyond frameworks and metrics to take meaningful action based on data. This requires building a foundation of trust and psychological safety. We're actively researching novel ways to do this with our collab with the University of Victoria and CHISEL.

Understanding feedback within software teams

Our aim is to support teams to deliver quickly, without compromising quality or wellbeing. Our collaboration with the HASEL Lab at the University of Auckland involves investigating approaches to understanding digital collaboration and building novel ways to predict feedback quality.

Our data principles – 
What we measure and why

We recognize the particular risks of working with data about people. For that reason, we’ve put together a set of data ethics principles to govern our work. These principles act as guardrails for what we will and won’t do with data.