- Brad Myer's Natural Programming Project at CMU (tons of novel tools!): http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~NatProg/index.html
- Andy Ko's work on debugging and learning to code: http://faculty.washington.edu/ajko/publications
- Emerson Murphy-Hill's work on the usability of dev tools, especially refactoring tools: https://people.engr.ncsu.edu/ermurph3/pubs.html
- Chris Parnin's studies on the cognitive aspects of coding: http://chrisparnin.me/
- Chrsitian Bird's empirical studies of developers: http://www.cabird.com/wp/publications/
- Thomas LaToza's work on the collaborative aspects of development: https://cs.gmu.edu/~tlatoza/papers.html
- Bjorn Hartmann's help support in code editors and tutorial generation: https://people.eecs.berkeley.edu/~bjoern/
- Philip Guo's tools to support novices with coding: http://www.pgbovine.net/publications.htm
- My dissertation "Human-Centric Tools for Navigating Code": http://web.eecs.utk.edu/~azh/publications.html
- Margaret Burnett's work on how people forage for information in code: http://web.engr.oregonstate.edu/~burnett/reprints.html
- Cognitive Dimensions of Notations (Green 1989) http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.128...
- Programmers Are Users Too: Human-Centered Methods for Improving Programming Tools (Myers et al. 2016) http://faculty.washington.edu/ajko/papers/Myers2016Programme...
- Programmer Interrupted (Parnin 2013) http://blog.ninlabs.com/2013/01/programmer-interrupted/
- Empirical analysis of programming language adoption (Meyerovich and Rabkin 2013) https://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2509515
- Learnable Programming (Victor 2012) http://worrydream.com/LearnableProgramming/
- Usability of Programming Languages working group at CHI'16 https://docs.google.com/document/d/1-GUt5oVPpi7rlObbU1WbA5V1...