Mathieu is a Lecturer in the department of Computer Science and Software Engineering at University of Canterbury. While doing a BSc in mathematics, he became a research intern in a software engineering lab, which sparked his interest for the field. He then completed both his MSc and PhD degrees in computer science at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, where he grew up. His PhD was supported by a Canada Graduate Research Scholarship from NSERC and a doctoral scholarship from FRQNT, respectively Canada’s and Quebec’s governmental funding agencies for natural sciences and engineering. During his PhD, Mathieu spent 3 months as a visiting researcher at Universität Hamburg in Germany. He returned for a second 3-month visit before moving to New Zealand.
Mathieu’s research focuses on the exchange of knowledge among developers. A central theme of this research is software documentation. His PhD thesis proposed a new web format to present API usage tutorials, with a focus on complete code examples. Now that it’s easier than ever to generate documents with LLM, the goal of this research was to understand the factors that help developers locate the information they need when interacting with documents. During his master’s studies, Mathieu worked on an approach to leverage the recurrent and redundant information in tests and documentation to reduce the effort involved in creating both artifacts. Mathieu’s interests extends beyond what is documented: an early project measured the tacit knowledge lost due to developer turnover, while a more recent project investigated the consistency of testing conventions, as a form of shared knowledge.
In his free time, Mathieu likes to climb (mostly indoor bouldering), run long distances (road or trail), or hike. He was a competitive fencer in a previous life. At home, he is a fantasy reader, a casual chess player, and a fan of board games, Lego sets, and logic puzzles.
