Monday, September 12, 9:00-10:30

Software Engineering: Practical challenges and how researchers can help

Mauricio Aniche

ABSTRACT

Software engineering is and will always be a craft. That being said, we are now closer than ever to make it a more science-based, evidence-based profession. To get there faster, we need a strong alignment between industry and academia. As someone that moved from industry to academia and back, I have had the opportunity to learn from both sides.

In this talk, I will describe, through many examples from industry and academia, how both worlds work. From the practical side, I'll show how engineering organizations take technical and organizational decisions. From an academic perspective, how to tackle their challenges.

It is my hope that, after this talk, academics and practitioners will understand each other better. Because, remember: we are better together.

Dr. Maurício Aniche's life's mission is to make software engineers better at what they do. He leads the Tech Academy of Adyen, a Dutch payment company that allows businesses to accept e-commerce, mobile, and point-of-sale payments. Maurício is also an assistant professor of software engineering at Delft University of Technology in the Netherlands, where he conducts research on how to make developers more productive during testing and maintenance. His teaching efforts in software testing gained him the Computer Science Teacher of the Year 2021 award and the TU Delft Education Fellowship, a prestigious fellowship given to innovative lecturers. Maurício holds MSc and PhD degrees in computer science from the University of São Paulo, Brazil. During his MSc, he co-founded Alura, one of the most popular e-learning platforms for software engineers in Brazil. He is the author of the "Effective Software Testing: A Developer's Guide", published by Manning in 2022. He's also the author of two books that are popular among Brazilian developers: "Test-Driven Development in the Real World" and "Object-Oriented Programming and SOLID for Ninjas". Maurício strongly believes that software engineering will soon become a more science-based field. One of his goals is to make sure that practitioners get to know what academics are up to and academics get to know the real challenges that practitioners face in their daily jobs.

Homepage – https://www.linkedin.com/in/mauricioaniche/

Tuesday, September 13, 16:30-18:00

Recognizing Developers' Emotions: Advances and Open Challenges

Nicole Novielli

ABSTRACT

Software development is an intellectual activity requiring creativity and problem-solving skills, which are known to be influenced by emotions. Developers experience a wide range of affective states during programming tasks, which may have an impact on their job performance and wellbeing. Early recognition of negative emotions, such as stress or frustration can enable just-in-time intervention for developers and team managers, in order to prevent burnout and undesired turnover. In this talk, I will provide an overview of recent research findings of sentiment analysis in software engineering (SE), address the open challenges, and provide empirically-based guidelines for safe (re)use of SE-specific tools in order to obtain meaningful results.

Dr. Nicole Novielli is an Assistant Professor at the University of Bari. Her research interests lie at the intersection of software engineering and affective computing with a specific focus on emotion mining from software repositories, natural language processing of developers’ communication traces, and biometric recognition of developers’ emotions.

Homepage – https://collab.di.uniba.it/nicole/

Tuesday, September 13, 9:30-11:00

Quality assessment of untestable programs: the metamorphic way

Sergio Segura

ABSTRACT

Software quality assessment is becoming increasingly challenging due to the complexity and scale of current software systems. One of the main obstacles lies in the difficulty of determining whether the program's output is correct or not. This is known as the oracle problem, and the programs suffering from it are often referred to as untestable. Metamorphic testing circumvents the oracle problem, and therefore allows detecting bugs in "untestable" programs, following an original idea: instead of analysing program outputs individually, metamorphic testing exploits the relationships between the inputs and outputs of two or more program executions. More than two decades after its introduction, metamorphic testing has become a fully-fledged testing technique with successful applications in multiple domains, including autonomous vehicles, search engines, web APIs, compilers, AI-driven programs, cyber-physical systems, and simulators. Success stories have been reported in large companies such as Adobe, Facebook, and Google. Recent research efforts explore the applications of metamorphic testing beyond functional testing, revealing the potential of the technique for general software quality assessment. In this talk, Sergio will guide us through the area of metamorphic testing, including an introduction to the technique, its evolution, successful applications, and open problems.

Dr. Sergio Segura is an Associate Professor at the University of Seville (US), Spain, and a senior member of the Applied Software Engineering (ISA) research group. He is also a co-founder and a member of the direction board of the Unit of Excellence Smart Computer Systems Research and Engineering (SCORE) of the US, where he leads the research line on software and services engineering. Sergio's research focuses on improving developers' productivity and software quality through automation. His contributions expand to different topics, including software product lines, search-based testing and, most notably, to the field of metamorphic testing, where he is internationally recognised as a leading voice. He has (co-)authored some highly cited papers as well as tools used by more than 50 universities and companies for teaching and research purposes. He regularly serves as a PC member and a reviewer of international venues and journals, including IEEE TSE, ACM TOSEM, EMSE, JSS, IST, and STVR. Member of the board of distinguished reviewers of ACM TOSEM. He was one of the co-founders (2016) and keynote speaker (2018) of the International Workshop on Metamorphic Testing. Chair of the ACM student research competition at ICSE 2021. VaMoS'20 MIP Award.

Homepage – https://personales.us.es/sergiosegura/