Marco Aurelio Gerosa

Northern Arizona University | NAU · School of Informatics, Computing, and Cyber Systems

Women are underrepresented in open source projects, causing them to lose career and skill-development opportunities. This article highlights the challenges that women face being a part of open source projects and lists a set of strategies that communities can implement to mitigate these issues.

Projects on GitHub rely on the automation provided by software development bots to uphold quality and alleviate developers' workload. Nevertheless, the presence of bots can be annoying and disruptive to the community. Backed by multiple studies with practitioners, this paper provides guidelines for developing and maintaining software bots. These gu...

Context: Code annotation is a feature to define custom metadata about programming elements. Many modern frameworks and APIs use annotations to keep integration less verbose and closer to the corresponding code element. However, contrary to the initial intent, practitioners often complain about the negative impacts of annotations on code readability...

Women are underrepresented in Open Source Software (OSS) projects, as a result of which, not only do women lose career and skill development opportunities, but the projects themselves suffer from a lack of diversity of perspectives. Practitioners and researchers need to understand more about the phenomenon; however, studies about women in open sour...

Software bots are becoming increasingly popular in software engineering (SE). In this tutorial, we define what a bot is and present several examples. We also discuss the many benefits bots provide to the SE community, including helping in development tasks (such as pull request review and integration) and onboarding newcomers to a project. Finally,...

Software bots connect users and tools, streamlining the pull request review process in social coding platforms. Nevertheless, the presence of bots can be annoying and disruptive to the community. Interviewing open-source developers, we created a theory of how human developers perceive annoying bot behaviors as noise. To identify strategies to overc...

Software bots have been facilitating several development activities in Open Source Software (OSS) projects, including code review. However, these bots may bring unexpected impacts to group dynamics, as frequently occurs with new technology adoption. Understanding and anticipating such effects is important for planning and management. To analyze the...

Software bots connect users and tools, streamlining the pull request review process in social coding platforms. However, bots can introduce information overload into developers' communication. Information overload is especially problematic for newcomers, who are still exploring the project and may feel overwhelmed by the number of messages. Inspire...

Bots automate tasks in software engineering projects and interact with software developers. Bots have been proposed, for example, for testing, maintenance, and automating bug fixes. The research community has been discussing these bots in the International Workshop on Bots in Software Engineering (BotSE), collocated with ICSE (the International Con...

Software engineering bots are applications that are able to react to external stimuli, such as events triggered by tools and messages posted by users, and run automated tasks in response, working as an interface between users and services. Bots often include conversational capabilities to interact with end users through textual messages (in chatbot...

[Background] Selecting an appropriate task is challenging for Open Source Software (OSS) project newcomers and a variety of strategies can help them in this process. [Aims] In this research, we compare the perspective of maintainers, newcomers, and existing contributors about the importance of strategies to support this process. Our goal is to iden...

Automated tools are frequently used in social coding repositories to perform repetitive activities that are part of the distributed software development process. Recently, GitHub introduced GitHub Actions, a feature providing automated workflows for repository maintainers. Understanding and anticipating the effects of adopting such kind of technolo...

Participation in Open Source Software (OSS) projects offers real software development experience for students and other newcomers seeking to develop their skills. However, onboarding to an OSS project brings various challenges, including finding a suitable task among various open issues. Selecting an appropriate starter task requires newcomers to i...

Several Open-Source Software (OSS) projects depend on the continuity of their development communities to remain sustainable. Understanding how developers become inactive or why they take breaks can help communities prevent abandonment and incentivize developers to come back. In this paper, we propose a novel method to identify developers’ inactive...

Chatbots are often designed to mimic social roles attributed to humans. However, little is known about the impact of using language that fails to conform to the associated social role. Our research draws on sociolinguistic to investigate how a chatbot’s language choices can adhere to the expected social role the agent performs within a context. We...

Bots have become popular in software projects as they play critical roles, from running tests to fixing bugs/vulnerabilities. However, the large number of software bots adds extra effort to practitioners and researchers to distinguish human accounts from bot accounts to avoid bias in data-driven studies. Researchers developed several approaches to...

Addressing women's under-representation in the software industry, a widely recognized concern, requires attracting as well as retaining more women. Hearing from women practitioners, particularly those positioned in multi-cultural settings, about their challenges and and adopting their lived experienced solutions can support the design of programs t...

Open Source Software (OSS) Foundations and projects are investing in creating Diversity and Inclusion (D&I) initiatives. However, little is known about contributors' perceptions about the usefulness and success of such initiatives. We aim to close this gap by investigating how contributors perceive the state of D&I in their community. In collaborat...

Chatbots often perform social roles associated with human interlocutors; hence, designing chatbot language to conform with the stereotypes of its social category is critical to the success of this technology. In a previous study, Chaves et al. performed a corpus analysis to evaluate how language variation in an interactional situation, namely the l...

Software bots automate tasks within Open Source Software (OSS) projects' pull requests and save reviewing time and effort ("the good"). However, their interactions can be disruptive and noisy and lead to information overload ("the bad"). To identify strategies to overcome such problems, we applied Design Fiction as a participatory method with 32 pr...

Mentoring is a well-known way to help newcomers to Open Source Software (OSS) projects overcome initial contribution barriers. Through mentoring, newcomers learn to acquire essential technical, social, and organizational skills. Despite the importance of OSS mentors, they are understudied in the literature. Understanding who OSS project mentors are...

Software bots are used to streamline tasks in Open Source Software (OSS) projects' pull requests, saving development cost, time, and effort. However, their presence can be disruptive to the community. We identified several challenges caused by bots in pull request interactions by interviewing 21 practitioners, including project maintainers, contrib...

Open source communities hosted in large foundations operate in a complex socio-technical ecosystem, which includes a heterogeneous mix of projects and stakeholders. Previous work has thus far investigated the challenges faced in OSS communities from the point of view of specific stakeholders, primarily at the level of individual projects. None have...

Success in Open Source Software (OSS) is often perceived as an exclusively code-centric endeavor. This perception can exclude a variety of individuals with a diverse set of skills and backgrounds, in turn helping exacerbate the current diversity & inclusion imbalance in OSS. Because ones perspective of success can affect ones personal, professional...

Software bots are used to streamline tasks in Open Source Software (OSS) projects’ pull requests, savingdevelopment cost, time, and effort. However, their presence can be disruptive to the community. We identifiedseveral challenges caused by bots in pull request interactions by interviewing 21 practitioners, includingproject maintainers, contributo...

Software plays a central role in modern societies, with its high economic value and potential for advancing societal change. In this paper, we characterise challenges and opportunities for a country progressing towards entering the global software industry, focusing on Papua New Guinea (PNG). By hosting a Software Engineering workshop, we conducted...

Success in Open Source Software (OSS) is often perceived as an exclusively code-centric endeavor. This perception can exclude a variety of individuals with a diverse set of skills and backgrounds, in turn helping create the current diversity \& inclusion imbalance in OSS. Because people's perspectives of success affect their personal, professional,...

Participation of women in Open Source Software (OSS) is very unbalanced, despite various efforts to improve diversity. This is concerning not only because women do not get the chance of career and skill developments afforded by OSS, but also because OSS projects suffer from a lack of diversity of thoughts because of a lack of diversity in their pro...

This position paper discusses the relevance of register as a theoretical framework for chatbot language design. We present the concept of register and discuss how using register-specific language influence the user's perceptions of the interaction with chatbots. Additionally, we point several research opportunities that are important to pursue to e...

Understanding students' programming misconceptions is critical. Doing so depends on identifying the reasons why students make errors when learning a new programming language. Knowing the misconceptions can help students to improve their reflection about their mistakes and also help instructors to design better teaching strategies. In this technical...

Software bots are used to streamline tasks in Open Source Software (OSS) projects' pull requests, saving development cost, time, and effort. However, their presence can be disruptive to the community. We identified several challenges caused by bots in pull request interactions by interviewing 21 practitioners, including project maintainers, contrib...

Software bots have been facilitating several development activities in Open Source Software (OSS) projects, including code review. However, these bots may bring unexpected impacts to group dynamics, as frequently occurs with new technology adoption. Understanding and anticipating such effects is important for planning and management. To analyze the...

Abstract—Open Source Software projects add labels to open issues to help contributors choose tasks. However, manually labeling issues is time-consuming and error-prone. Current automatic approaches for creating labels are mostly limited to classifying issues as a bug/non-bug. In this paper, we investigate the feasibility and relevance of labeling i...

Open Source Software projects add labels to open issues to help contributors choose tasks. However, manually labeling issues is time-consuming and error-prone. Current automatic approaches for creating labels are mostly limited to classifying issues as a bug/non-bug. In this paper, we investigate the feasibility and relevance of labeling issues wit...

Automated tools are frequently used in social coding repositories to perform repetitive activities that are part of the distributed software development process. Recently, GitHub introduced GitHub Actions, a feature providing automated workflows for repository maintainers. Although several Actions have been built and used by practitioners, relative...

Automated tools are frequently used in social coding repositories to perform repetitive activities that are part of the distributed software development process. Recently, GitHub introduced GitHub Actions, a feature providing automated workflows for repository maintainers. Although several Actions have been built and used by practitioners, relative...

Several Open Source Software (OSS) projects depend on the continuity of their development communities to remain sustainable. Understanding how developers become inactive or why they take breaks can help communities prevent abandonment and incentivize developers to come back. In this paper, we propose a novel method to identify developers' inactive...

Open Source Software projects add labels to open issues to help contributors choose tasks. However, manually labeling issues is time-consuming and error-prone. Current automatic approaches for creating labels are mostly limited to classifying issues as a bug/non-bug. In this paper, we investigate the feasibility and relevance of labeling issues wit...

Bots automate many tasks in software engineering projects often in the form of chatbots. Bots have been proposed, for example, for testing, maintenance, or automating bug fixes. Following the success of the first BotSE workshop, we organized this second edition collocated with ICSE 2020 to bring together the research community that investigates bot...

A well-known way to help newcomers overcome initial contribution challenges is mentoring. This strategy has proven effective in offline and online communities, and to some extent has been employed in Open Source Software (OSS) projects. Through mentoring, newcomers are trained to acquire the technical, social, and organizational skills they need. D...

Chatbots are often designed to mimic social roles attributed to humans. However, little is known about the impact on user's perceptions of using language that fails to conform to the associated social role. Our research draws on sociolinguistic theory to investigate how a chatbot's language choices can adhere to the expected social role the agent p...

Open Source Software (OSS) has changed drastically over the last decade, with OSS projects now producing a large ecosystem of popular products, involving industry participation, and providing professional career opportunities. But our field's understanding of what motivates people to contribute to OSS is still fundamentally grounded in studies from...

Chatbots’ growing popularity has brought new challenges to HCI, having changed the patterns of human interactions with computers. The increasing need to approximate conversational interaction styles raises expectations for chatbots to present social behaviors that are habitual in human–human communication. In this survey, we argue that chatbots sho...

Summer of code programs connect students to open source software (OSS) projects, typically during the summer break from school. Analyzing consolidated summer of code programs can reveal how college students, who these programs usually target, can be motivated to participate in OSS, and what onboarding strategies OSS communities adopt to receive the...

Software developers routinely search for code using general-purpose search engines. However, these search engines cannot find code semantically unless it has an accompanying description. We propose a technique for semantic code search: A Convolutional Neural Network approach to code retrieval (CoNCRA). Our technique aims to find the code snippet th...

Software developers who want to start contributing to an Open Source Software (OSS) project often struggle to find appropriate first tasks. The voluntary, self-organizing distribution of decentralized labor and the distinct nature of some OSS projects intensifies this challenge. Mentors, who work closely with newcomers, develop strategies to recomm...

Software bots are used by Open Source Software (OSS) projects to streamline the code review process. Interfacing between developers and automated services, code review bots report continuous integration failures, code quality checks, and code coverage. However, the impact of such bots on maintenance tasks is still neglected. In this paper, we study...

Software bots, which are widely adopted by Open Source Software (OSS) projects, support developers on several activities, including code review. However, as with any new technology adoption, bots may impact group dynamics. Since understanding and anticipating such effects is important for planning and management, we investigate how several activity...

Previous research has revealed that newcomer women are disproportionately affected by gender-biased barriers in open source software (OSS) projects. However, this research has focused mainly on social/cultural factors, neglecting the software tools and infrastructure. To shed light on how OSS tools and infrastructure might factor into OSS barriers...