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Sherlock Licorish imageBSc(UoG), MSc, PhD(AUT)
Associate Professor

Room 3.41, Otago Business School
Tel +64 3 479 8319
Email sherlock.licorish@otago.ac.nz
Linkedin Sherlock Licorish

Background and interests

Associate Professor Sherlock Licorish's current research focuses on:

  • Modelling the software development process and evaluating the use of software methodologies, and particularly agile approaches.
    Modelling sample paper (PDF)
  • Exploring and evaluating software teams' behaviour and performance under various conditions, or in addressing various forms of software activities (e.g. resolving defects or building new features, gathering software requirements, or performing software maintenance tasks).
    Behaviour sample paper (PDF)
  • The development and provision of software tools to aid software developers and enhance end-users' involvement in the feedback processes. Associate Professor Licorish is also interested in topics considered under market-driven (and crowd-sourced) requirements engineering.
    Software tools sample paper (PDF)
    Crowdsourcing sample paper (PDF)
  • Empirical software engineering and software analytics, covering software code quality and fault detection and repair, static analysis tools, global software development, open source software (OSS) development and virtual communities.
    Global development sample paper (PDF)
    OSS sample paper (PDF)

Associate Professor Licorish's analytics research involves the use of data mining, data visualization, statistical analysis and other quantitative methods (e.g. social network analysis, linguistic and sentiment analysis, natural language processing (NLP) and probabilistic modelling techniques).

He has also used qualitative methods in his research, including qualitative forms of content analysis and dilemma analysis. These techniques (both quantitative and qualitative) are often applied to large repositories and software artefacts.

Associate Professor Licorish serves as a reviewer for several top conferences and journals.

Papers

Supervision

Associate Professor Licorish has been the recipient of a Supervisor Award.

Currently supervising

  • Pascal Omondiagbe
  • Lakmal Vithanage
  • Chathrie Wimalasooriya
  • Elijah Zoldouarrati

Currently co-supervising

  • Adriaan Lotter

Completed supervisions

  • Fathima Nuzla Ismail (PhD)
  • Saurabh Malgaonkar (PhD)
  • Elijah Zolduoarrati (MSc)
  • Adriaan Lotter (MSc)
  • Mihir Kumar Jha (MSc)
  • Phonephasouk Volabouth (MSc)
  • Pascal Omondiagbe (MSc)
  • Chan Won Lee (MSc)
  • Swetha Keertipati (MSc)
  • Smitha Keertipati (MSc)
  • Elijah Zolduoarrati (Hons)
  • Mike Huang (Hons)
  • Sarah Meldrum (Hons)
  • Georgia Greenheld (Hons)
  • Tavita Su'a (Hons)

Publications

Deshapriya, L., Licorish, S. A., & Woodford, B. J. (2026). Understanding warnings generated by PMD and SonarQube, their rules and compliance to established coding standards. Science of Computer Programming, 252, 103470. doi: 10.1016/j.scico.2026.103470 Journal - Research Article

Owen, H., Licorish, S., Moerenhout, T., & Robertson, K. (2025). AI-assisted injury risk prediction for older New Zealanders: A proposed co-design approach. Proceedings of the New Zealand Association of Gerontology (NZAG) Conference: Ageing Together. (pp. 32). Retrieved from http://gerontology.org.nz Conference Contribution - Published proceedings: Abstract

Zolduoarrati, E., Licorish, S. A., & Stanger, N. (2025). Comprehensive predictive analytics for collaborators' answers, code quality, and dropout: Stack overflow case study. Empirical Software Engineering, 30, 147. doi: 10.1007/s10664-025-10692-4 Journal - Research Article

Ismail, F. N., Woodford, B. J., & Licorish, S. A. (2025). Atmospheric modeling for wildfire prediction. Atmosphere, 16, 441. doi: 10.3390/atmos16040441 Journal - Research Article

Licorish, S. A. (2025). Understanding the effect of agile practice quality on software product quality. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 51(2), 650-662. doi: 10.1109/tse.2025.3532502 Journal - Research Article

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