BSc(CESUPA), MSc, PhD(UFRN)
Senior Lecturer
Room 3.45, Otago Business School
Tel +64 3 479 8796
Email danielcalencar@otago.ac.nz
Background and interests
My main research field is Empirical Software Engineering. I use methodologies such as machine learning, statistics and qualitative techniques (e.g., surveys and interviews) to better understand the software development phenomena.
The goal of my research is to augment the body of knowledge of the Software Engineering field and ultimately optimise the practice of software development. For example, what practices suit a development team better? A shorter releasing cycle with several sprints or a longer release cycle with minor releases along the way? Despite being important (and sometimes risky) decisions, software project managers have limited access to a body of scientific knowledge that can help them take important decisions.
My research aims to build a solid empirical knowledge of Software Engineering to help practicians take informed decisions. With an increasing corpus of empirical knowledge (i.e., data) about software engineering, the development of tools to aid developers building software naturally comes as another focus of my research. For example, I use machine learning algorithms to learn from historical data and help developers to identify bottlenecks within the development process.
In addition to research, I like bodybuilding, games, and, especially meeting new people. Feel free to send me an e-mail!
Papers
- INFO 201 Developing Information Systems 1
- INFO 202 Developing Information Systems 2
- INFO 301 Applied Project
- INFO 310 Software Project Management
Supervision
Currently co-supervising:
- Chathrie Wimalasooriya
Publications
Falessi, D., Laureani, S. M., Çarka, J., Esposito, M., & Alencar da Costa, D. (2023). Enhancing the defectiveness prediction of methods and classes via JIT. Empirical Software Engineering, 28, 37. doi: 10.1007/s10664-022-10261-z
Santos, J., Alencar da Costa, D., & Kulesza, U. (2022). Investigating the impact of continuous integration practices on the productivity and quality of open-source projects. In F. Madeiral, C. Lassenius, T. Conte & T. Männistö (Eds.), Proceedings of the 16th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM). (pp. 137-147). New York, NY: ACM. doi: 10.1145/3544902.3546244
Soares, E., Sizilio, G., Santos, J., Alencar da Costa, D., & Kulesza, U. (2022). The effects of continuous integration on software development: A systematic literature review. Empirical Software Engineering, 27, 78. doi: 10.1007/s10664-021-10114-1
Wimalasooriya, C., Licorish, S. A., Alencar da Costa, D., & MacDonell, S. G. (2022). A systematic mapping study addressing the reliability of mobile applications: The need to move beyond testing reliability. Journal of Systems & Software, 186, 111166. doi: 10.1016/j.jss.2021.111166
Ghaleb, T. A., Alencar da Costa, D., & Zou, Y. (2022). On the popularity of internet of things projects in online communities An empirical study of Hackster.io. Information Systems Frontiers, 24, 1601-1634. doi: 10.1007/s10796-021-10157-1
Falessi, D., Laureani, S. M., Çarka, J., Esposito, M., & Alencar da Costa, D. (2023). Enhancing the defectiveness prediction of methods and classes via JIT. Empirical Software Engineering, 28, 37. doi: 10.1007/s10664-022-10261-z
Journal - Research Article
Ghaleb, T. A., Alencar da Costa, D., & Zou, Y. (2022). On the popularity of internet of things projects in online communities An empirical study of Hackster.io. Information Systems Frontiers, 24, 1601-1634. doi: 10.1007/s10796-021-10157-1
Journal - Research Article
Wimalasooriya, C., Licorish, S. A., Alencar da Costa, D., & MacDonell, S. G. (2022). A systematic mapping study addressing the reliability of mobile applications: The need to move beyond testing reliability. Journal of Systems & Software, 186, 111166. doi: 10.1016/j.jss.2021.111166
Journal - Research Article
Zhao, Y., Alencar da Costa, D., & Zou, Y. (2022). Composing web services using a multi-agent framework. IEEE Transactions on Services Computing, 15(4), 2100-2113. doi: 10.1109/TSC.2020.3032976
Journal - Research Article
Fan, Y., Xia, X., Alencar da Costa, D., Lo, D., Hassan, A. E., & Li, S. (2021). The impact of changes mislabeled by SZZ on just-in-time defect prediction. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 47(8), 1559-1586. doi: 10.1109/TSE.2019.2929761
Journal - Research Article
Ghaleb, T. A., Alencar da Costa, D., Zou, Y., & Hassan, A. E. (2021). Studying the impact of noises in build breakage data. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 47(9), 1998-2011. doi: 10.1109/TSE.2019.2941880
Journal - Research Article
Vandehei, B., Alencar da Costa, D., & Falessi, D. (2021). Leveraging the defects life cycle to label affected versions and defective classes. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering & Methodology, 30(2), 24. doi: 10.1145/3433928
Journal - Research Article
Ghaleb, T. A., Alencar da Costa, D., & Zou, Y. (2019). An empirical study of the long duration of continuous integration builds. Empirical Software Engineering, 24, 2102-2139. doi: 10.1007/s10664-019-09695-9
Journal - Research Article
Huang, Y., Alencar da Costa, D., Zhang, F., & Zou, Y. (2019). An empirical study on the issue reports with questions raised during the issue resolving process. Empirical Software Engineering, 24, 718-750. doi: 10.1007/s10664-018-9636-3
Journal - Research Article
Zhao, G., Alencar da Costa, D., & Zou, Y. (2019). Improving the pull requests review process using learning-to-rank algorithms. Empirical Software Engineering, 24, 2140-2170. doi: 10.1007/s10664-019-09696-8
Journal - Research Article
Alencar da Costa, D., McIntosh, S., Kulesza, U., Hassan, A. E., & Abebe, S. L. (2018). An empirical study of the integration time of fixed issues. Empirical Software Engineering, 23(1), 334-383. doi: 10.1007/s10664-017-9520-6
Journal - Research Article
Alencar da Costa, D., McIntosh, S., Treude, C., Kulesza, U., & Hassan, A. E. (2018). The impact of rapid release cycles on the integration delay of fixed issues. Empirical Software Engineering, 23(2), 835-904. doi: 10.1007/s10664-017-9548-7
Journal - Research Article
Alencar da Costa, D., McIntosh, S., Shang, W., Kulesza, U., Coelho, R., & Hassan, A. E. (2017). A framework for evaluating the results of the SZZ approach for identifying bug-introducing changes. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 43(7), 641-657. doi: 10.1109/TSE.2016.2616306
Journal - Research Article
Freire, M., Kulesza, U., Aranha, E., Nery, G., Alencar da Costa, D., Jedlitschka, A., … Gómez, M. N. (2014). Assessing and evolving a domain specific language for formalizing software engineering experiments: An empirical study. International Journal of Software Engineering & Knowledge Engineering, 24(10), 1509-1531. doi: 10.1142/S0218194014400178
Journal - Research Article
Soares, E., Sizilio, G., Santos, J., Alencar da Costa, D., & Kulesza, U. (2022). The effects of continuous integration on software development: A systematic literature review. Empirical Software Engineering, 27, 78. doi: 10.1007/s10664-021-10114-1
Journal - Research Other
Santos, J., Alencar da Costa, D., & Kulesza, U. (2022). Investigating the impact of continuous integration practices on the productivity and quality of open-source projects. In F. Madeiral, C. Lassenius, T. Conte & T. Männistö (Eds.), Proceedings of the 16th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM). (pp. 137-147). New York, NY: ACM. doi: 10.1145/3544902.3546244
Conference Contribution - Published proceedings: Full paper
Amaral, L., Oliveira, M. C., Luz, W., Fortes, J., Bonifácio, R., Alencar da Costa, D., … Lo, D. (2020). How (not) to find bugs: The interplay between merge conflicts, co-changes, and bugs. Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME). (pp. 441-452). IEEE. doi: 10.1109/icsme46990.2020.00049
Conference Contribution - Published proceedings: Full paper
Felidré, W., Furtado, L., Alencar da Costa, D., Cartaxo, B., & Pinto, G. (2019). Continuous integration theater. Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement. IEEE. doi: 10.1109/ESEM.2019.8870152
Conference Contribution - Published proceedings: Full paper
Neto, E. C., Alencar da Costa, D., & Kulesza, U. (2019). Revisiting and improving SZZ implementations. Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM). IEEE. doi: 10.1109/ESEM.2019.8870178
Conference Contribution - Published proceedings: Full paper
Yang, A., Alencar da Costa, D., & Zou, Y. (2019). Predicting Co-Changes between Functionality Specifications and Source Code in Behavior Driven Development. Proceedings of the 16th Mining Software Repositories (MSR) International Conference. IEEE. doi: 10.1109/MSR.2019.00080
Conference Contribution - Published proceedings: Full paper
Bernardo, J. H., Alencar da Costa, D., & Kulesza, U. (2018). Studying the impact of adopting continuous integration on the delivery time of pull requests. Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories. (pp. 131-141). New York, NY: ACM. doi: 10.1145/3196398.3196421
Conference Contribution - Published proceedings: Full paper
Neto, E. C., Alencar da Costa, D., & Kulesza, U. (2018). The impact of refactoring changes on the SZZ algorithm: An empirical study. Proceedings of the IEEE 25th International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER). (pp. 380-390). IEEE. doi: 10.1109/SANER.2018.8330225
Conference Contribution - Published proceedings: Full paper
Noei, E., Alencar da Costa, D., & Zou, Y. (2018). Winning the app production rally. Proceedings of the 26th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference & Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering. (pp. 283-294). New York, NY: ACM. doi: 10.1145/3236024.3236044
Conference Contribution - Published proceedings: Full paper
Dias, L. F., Steinmacher, I., Pinto, G., Alencar da Costa, D., & Gerosa, M. (2017). How does the shift to GitHub impact project collaboration? Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME). (pp. 473-477). IEEE. doi: 10.1109/ICSME.2016.78
Conference Contribution - Published proceedings: Full paper
Zhao, Y., Zou, Y., Ng, J., & Alencar da Costa, D. (2017). An automatic approach for transforming IoT applications to RESTful services on the cloud. In M. Maximilien, A. Vallecillo, J. Wang & M. Oriol (Eds.), Service-Oriented Computing (ICSOC): Lecture notes in computer science (Vol. 10601). (pp. 673-689). Cham, Switzerland: Springer. doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-69035-3_49
Conference Contribution - Published proceedings: Full paper
Alencar da Costa, D., McIntosh, S., Kulesza, U., & Hassan, A. E. (2016). The impact of switching to a rapid release cycle on the integration delay of addressed issues: An empirical study of the Mozilla Firefox project. Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories. (pp. 374-385). New York, NY: ACM. doi: 10.1145/2901739.2901764
Conference Contribution - Published proceedings: Full paper
Alencar da Costa, D., Abebe, S. L., McIntosh, S., Kulesza, U., & Hassan, A. E. (2014). An empirical study of delays in the integration of addressed issues. Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution. (pp. 281-290). IEEE. doi: 10.1109/ICSME.2014.50
Conference Contribution - Published proceedings: Full paper
Alencar da Costa, D., Kulesza, U., Aranha, E., & Coelho, R. (2014). Unveiling developers contributions behind code commits: An exploratory study. Proceedings of the 29th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing. (pp. 1152-1157). New York, NY: ACM. doi: 10.1145/2554850.2555030
Conference Contribution - Published proceedings: Full paper
Aleixo, F. A., Freire, M., Alencar da Costa, D., Campos, E., & Kulesza, U. (2012). A comprehensive study of compositional and annotative modelling approaches for software process lines. Proceedings of the 26th Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering. (pp. 51-60). IEEE. doi: 10.1109/SBES.2012.11
Conference Contribution - Published proceedings: Full paper
Vandehei, B., Alencar da Costa, D., & Falessi, D. (2020). Leveraging the defects life cycle to label affected versions and defective classes. arXiv. Retrieved from https://arxiv.org/abs/2011.05531
Working Paper; Discussion Paper; Technical Report
Felidré, W., Furtado, L., Alencar da Costa, D., Cartaxo, B., & Pinto, G. (2019). Continuous integration theater. arXIV. Retrieved from https://arxiv.org/abs/1907.01602
Working Paper; Discussion Paper; Technical Report
