Daniel Alencar da Costa, Our people, Department of Information Science

Daniel Alencar da Costa image 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

Yue, Y., Katare, R., Deng, J., Alencar da Costa, D., & Manning, P. (2026). Circulating microRNA signatures reveal core and reversible dysregulation in obesity via machine learning. Journal of Physiology. Advance online publication. doi: 10.1113/jp290345 Journal - Research Article

Yue, Y., Manning, P., De Ridder, D., Hall, M., Adhia, D. B., Ross, S., Alencar da Costa, D., & Deng, J. D. (2026). Machine learning-based identification of abnormal functional connectivity in obesity across different metabolic states. Communications Medicine, 6, 241. doi: 10.1038/s43856-026-01518-5 Journal - Research Article

Rakha, M. S., Miranskyy, A., & Alencar da Costa, D. (2025). Contrasting the Hyperparameter Tuning Impact Across Software Defect Prediction Scenarios. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. Advance online publication. doi: 10.1109/TSE.2025.3624631 Journal - Research Article

Santos, J., Alencar da Costa, D., McIntosh, S., & Kulesza, U. (2025). On the need to monitor continuous integration practices. Empirical Software Engineering, 30(5), 125. doi: 10.1007/s10664-025-10682-6 Journal - Research Article

Bernardo, J. H., Alencar da Costa, D., de Medeiros, S. Q., & Kulesza, U. (2024). How do machine learning projects use continuous integration practices? An empirical study on GitHub actions. Proceedings of the IEEE/ACM 21st International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR). (pp. 665-676). New York, NY: ACM. doi: 10.1145/3643991.3644915 Conference Contribution - Published proceedings: Full paper

2026

Journal - Research Article

2025

Journal - Research Article

2024

Journal - Research Article

Wimalasooriya, C., Licorish, S. A., Alencar da Costa, D., & MacDonell, S. G. (2024). Just-in-Time crash prediction for mobile apps. Empirical Software Engineering, 29, 68. doi: 10.1007/s10664-024-10455-7

Grattan, N., Alencar da Costa, D., & Stanger, N. (2024). The need for more informative defect prediction: A systematic literature review. Information & Software Technology, 171, 107456. doi: 10.1016/j.infsof.2024.107456

Licorish, S. A., Alencar da Costa, D., Zolduoarrati, E., & Grattan, N. (2024). Relating team atmosphere and group dynamics to student software development teams’ performance. Information & Software Technology, 167, 107377. doi: 10.1016/j.infsof.2023.107377

Conference Contribution - Published proceedings: Full paper

2023

Journal - Research Article

Bernardo, J. H., Alencar da Costa, D., Kulesza, U., & Treude, C. (2023). The impact of a continuous integration service on the delivery time of merged pull requests. Empirical Software Engineering, 28, 97. doi: 10.1007/s10664-023-10327-6

Alencar da Costa, D., Grattan, N., Stanger, N., & Licorish, S. A. (2023). Studying the characteristics of SQL-related development tasks: An empirical study. Empirical Software Engineering, 28, 69. doi: 10.1007/s10664-023-10295-x

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

Conference Contribution - Published proceedings: Full paper

Freitas, G., Bernardo, J. H., Sizílio, G., Alencar da Costa, D., & Kulesza, U. (2023). Analyzing the impact of CI sub-practices on continuous code quality in open-source projects: An empirical study. Proceedings of the XXXVII Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering (SBES). New York, NY: ACM. doi: 10.1145/3613372.3613403

Saraiva, D., Alencar da Costa, D., Kulesza, U., Sizílio, G., Neto, J. G., Coelho, R., & Nagappan, M. (2023). Unveiling the relationship between continuous integration and code coverage. Proceedings of the IEEE/ACM 20th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR). (pp. 247-259). IEEE. doi: 10.1109/MSR59073.2023.00043

2022

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

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

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 Other

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

Conference Contribution - Published proceedings: Full paper

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

2021

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

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

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

2020

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

Working Paper; Discussion Paper; Technical Report

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

2019

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

2018

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

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

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

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

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

2017

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

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

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

2016

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

2014

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

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

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

2012

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

Background and interests

Papers

Supervision

Currently co-supervising:

Publications

2026

Journal - Research Article

2025

Journal - Research Article

2024

Journal - Research Article

Conference Contribution - Published proceedings: Full paper

2023

Journal - Research Article

Conference Contribution - Published proceedings: Full paper

2022

Journal - Research Article

Journal - Research Other

Conference Contribution - Published proceedings: Full paper

2021

Journal - Research Article

2020

Conference Contribution - Published proceedings: Full paper

Working Paper; Discussion Paper; Technical Report

2019

Journal - Research Article

Conference Contribution - Published proceedings: Full paper

Working Paper; Discussion Paper; Technical Report

2018

Journal - Research Article

Conference Contribution - Published proceedings: Full paper

2017

Journal - Research Article

Conference Contribution - Published proceedings: Full paper

2016

Conference Contribution - Published proceedings: Full paper

2014

Journal - Research Article

Conference Contribution - Published proceedings: Full paper

2012

Conference Contribution - Published proceedings: Full paper

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