SERA (Software Engineering Research Assistant) is a tool developed by a student research team at Monash University to address the challenge of finding best practices, tools, and methodologies conducting human centric software engineering user studies.

Software engineering research often involves interaction with human participants at different stages throughout the software development life cycle. All human participants possess differences in various human aspects such as age, gender, culture, and physical and cognitive abilities. Typically, researchers rely on their own experience, the experience of their colleagues, or information found through a time-consuming investigation on how to best interact with different groups of people.

There are a number of issues associated with those sources. Some information or ethical considerations may be missed, older techniques may no longer apply (particularly in the new post-COVID era of online user research), the required knowledge may not be accessible, and it can be time consuming to mitigate all these risks.

The aim is to make SERA the prime source for researchers - particularly software engineering researchers - to find advice on how to work with various groups of people. It allows researchers to specify the cohorts they are focussed on, and easily find information on how to best perform research with that cohort. Additionally, researchers can submit their own content to give advice to their peers, creating an open community of knowledge sharing.

Developed for the betterment of human centric studies.