Nicole Novielli

• Ph.D. in Computer Science
• Professor (Assistant) at University of Bari Aldo Moro

Self-Admitted Technical Debt, or SATD, is a self-admission of technical debt present in a software system. To effectively manage SATD, developers need to estimate its priority and assess the effort required to fix the described technical debt. About a quarter of descriptions of SATD in software systems express some form of negativity or negative em...

While it is well-established that authentic emotional autobiographical memories elicit physiological responses, research suggests that this elicitation can also occur for fabricated autobiographical memories. Yet challenges arise from awareness discrepancies when considering two research fields: Participants in memory studies may be unaware of prod...

As researchers today, we are witnessing a fundamental change in our technologically-enabled world due to the advent and diffusion of highly disruptive technologies such as generative Artificial Intelligence (AI), Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR). In particular, software engineering has been profoundly affected by the transformative p...

Sentiment analysis has been used to study aspects of software engineering, such as issue resolution, toxicity, and self-admitted technical debt. To address the peculiarities of software engineering texts, sentiment analysis tools often consider the specific technical lingo practitioners use. To further improve the application of sentiment analysis,...

Reflecting on the limitations of a study is a crucial part of the research process. In software engineering studies, this reflection is typically conveyed through discussions of study limitations or threats to validity. In current practice, such discussions seldom provide sufficient insight to understand the rationale for decisions taken before and...

Capturing users’ engagement is crucial for gathering feedback about the features of a software product. In a market-driven context, current approaches to collecting and analyzing users’ feedback are based on techniques leveraging information extracted from product reviews and social media. These approaches are hardly applicable in contexts where on...

Writing and modifying source code are core activities in software development and evolution. The outcome of a coding task in terms of quality may depend on several aspects, such as the difficulty of the task or the complexity of the system. Besides, it is well known that individual characteristics of developers, like the programming experience, pla...

Software developers are known to experience a wide range of emotions while performing development tasks. Emotions expressed in developer communication might reflect openness of the ecosystem to newcomers, presence of conflicts, problems in the software development process, or source code itself. In this chapter, we present an overview of the state-...

We describe our participation in the tool competition in the scope of the 2nd International Workshop on Natural Language-based Software Engineering. We propose a supervised approach relying on SETFIT, a framework for few-shot learning and sentence-BERT (SBERT), a variant of BERT for effective sentence embedding. We experimented with different setti...

Flow is a precious mental status for achieving high sports performance. It is defined as an emotional state with high valence and high arousal levels. However, a viable detection system that could provide information about it in real-time is not yet recognized. The prospective work presented here aims to the creation of an online flow detection fra...

Opinion mining, sometimes referred to as sentiment analysis, has gained increasing attention in software engineering (SE) studies. SE researchers have applied opinion mining techniques in various contexts, such as identifying developers’ emotions expressed in code comments and extracting users’ critics toward mobile apps. Given the large amount of...

Self-Admitted Technical Debt (SATD) consists of annotations—typically, but not only, source code comments—pointing out incomplete features, maintainability problems, or, in general, portions of a program not-ready yet. The way a SATD comment is written, and specifically its polarity, may be a proxy indicator of the severity of the problem and, to s...

This paper presents an IoT-based game for cultural sites, Magic Torch, which aims to improve the visitors User eXperiences. It enables tangible interaction with ’smart’ artifacts that engage visitors and encourage their attention. In this paper, we focus on the design and development of the IoT devices involved in the games, illustrating the design...

Discussions is a new feature of GitHub for asking questions or discussing topics outside of specific Issues or Pull Requests. Before being available to all projects in December 2020, it had been tested on selected open source software projects. To understand how developers use this novel feature, how they perceive it, and how it impacts the develop...

Sentiment analysis methods have become popular for investigating human communication, including discussions related to software projects. Since general-purpose sentiment analysis tools do not fit well with the information exchanged by software developers, new tools, specific for software engineering (SE), have been developed. We investigate to what...

Emotions are known to impact cognitive skills, thus influencing job performance. This is also true for software development, which requires creativity and problem-solving abilities. In this paper, we report the results of a field study involving professional developers from five different companies. We provide empirical evidence that a link exists...

Capturing users engagement is crucial for gathering feedback about the features of a software product. In a market-driven context, current approaches to collect and analyze users feedback are based on techniques leveraging information extracted from product reviews and social media. These approaches are hardly applicable in bespoke software develop...

Discussions is a new feature of GitHub for asking questions or discussing topics outside of specific Issues or Pull Requests. Before being available to all projects in December 2020, it had been tested on selected open source software projects. To understand how developers use this novel feature, how they perceive it, and how it impacts the develop...

Context Code review is a widely used technique of systematic examination of code changes which aims at increasing software quality. Code reviews provide several benefits for the project, including finding bugs, knowledge transfer, and assurance of adherence to project guidelines and coding style. However, code reviews have a major cost: they can de...

Context: As a novel coronavirus swept the world in early 2020, thousands of software developers began working from home. Many did so on short notice, under difficult and stressful conditions. Objective: This study investigates the effects of the pandemic on developers' wellbeing and productivity. Method: A questionnaire survey was created main...

Sentiment analysis methods have become popular for investigating human communication, including discussions related to software projects. Since general-purpose sentiment analysis tools do not fit well with the information exchanged by software developers, new tools, specific for software engineering (SE), have been developed. We investigate to what...

Capturing users engagement is crucial for gathering feedback about the features of a software product. In a market-driven context, current approaches to collect and analyze users feedback are based on techniques leveraging information extracted from large amount of natural language product reviews and social media. These approaches are hardly appli...

Do you like your code? What kind of code makes developers happiest? What makes them angriest? Is it possible to monitor the mood of a large team of coders to determine when and where a codebase needs additional help?

Background. As a novel coronavirus swept the world in early 2020, thousands of software developers began working from home. Many did so on short notice , under difficult and stressful conditions. Aim. This paper seeks to understand the effects of the pandemic on developers' wellbeing and productivity. Method. A questionnaire survey was created main...

Do you like your code? What kind of code makes developers happiest? What makes them angriest? Is it possible to monitor the mood of a large team of coders to determine when and where a codebase needs additional help?

In open-source software (OSS), the design of usability is often influenced by the discussions among community members on platforms such as issue tracking systems (ITSs). However, digesting the rich information embedded in issue discussions can be a major challenge due to the vast number and diversity of the comments. We propose and evaluate ArguLen...

In this paper, we address the problem of using sentiment analysis tools 'off-the-shelf,' that is when a gold standard is not available for retraining. We evaluate the performance of four SE-specific tools in a cross-platform setting, i.e., on a test set collected from data sources different from the one used for training. We find that (i) the lexic...

Developers experience a wide range of emotions during programming tasks, which may have an impact on job performance. In this paper, we present an empirical study aimed at (i) investigating the link between emotion and progress, (ii) understanding the triggers for developers' emotions and the strategies to deal with negative ones, (iii) identifying...

In open-source software (OSS), the design of usability is often influenced by the discussions among community members on platforms such as issue tracking systems (ITSs). However, digesting the rich information embedded in issue discussions can be a major challenge due to the vast number and diversity of the comments. We propose and evaluate ArguLen...

We are glad to present the "Sentiment and Emotion in Software Engineering" special issue of IEEE Software . In recent years, this topic has gained attention from both the research community and industry. Indeed, academic researchers have organized a number of highly successful workshops, such as the International Workshop on Emotional Awareness in...

Technical Q&A sites have become essential for software engineers as they constantly seek help from other experts to solve their work problems. Despite their success, many questions remain unresolved, sometimes because the asker does not acknowledge any helpful answer. In these cases, an information seeker can only browse all the answers within a qu...

The Emotion Mining Toolkit (EMTk) is a suite of modules and datasets offering a comprehensive solution for mining sentiment and emotions from technical text contributed by developers on communication channels. The toolkit is written in Java, Python, and R, and is released under the MIT open source license. In this paper, we describe its architectur...

Technical Q&A sites have become essential for software engineers as they constantly seek help from other experts to solve their work problems. Despite their success, many questions remain unresolved, sometimes because the asker does not acknowledge any helpful answer. In these cases, an information seeker can only browse all the answers within a qu...

Code comprehension has been recently investigated from physiological and cognitive perspectives through the use of medical imaging. Floyd et al (i.e., the original study) used fMRI to classify the type of comprehension tasks performed by developers and relate such results to their expertise. We replicate the original study using lightweight biometr...

Sentiment analysis in social media is a popular task attracting the interest of the research community, also in recent evaluation campaigns of natural language processing tasks in several languages. We report on our experience in the organization of SENTIPOLC (SENTIment POLarity Classification Task), a shared task on sentiment classification of Ita...

Software developers experience a wide variety of emotions during their work and research is now focusing on the role played by these emotions on software developers productivity as well as on their wellbeing. In this paper, we propose a replication of a study aimed investigating to what extent biometric sensors can be used to automatically detect d...

The role of sentiment analysis is increasingly emerging to study software developers' emotions by mining crowd-generated content within social software engineering tools. However, off-the-shelf sentiment analysis tools have been trained on non-technical domains and general-purpose social media, thus resulting in misclassifications of technical jarg...

Software developers experience and share a wide range of emotions throughout a rich ecosystem of communication channels. A recent trend that has emerged in empirical software engineering studies is leveraging sentiment analysis of developers' communication traces. We release a dataset of 4,800 questions, answers, and comments from Stack Overflow, m...

The role of sentiment analysis is increasingly emerging to study software developers' emotions by mining crowd-generated content within software repositories and information sources. With a few notable exceptions [1][5], empirical software engineering studies have exploited off-the-shelf sentiment analysis tools. However, such tools have been train...

A recent research trend has emerged to identify developers' emotions, by applying sentiment analysis to the content of communication traces left in collaborative development environments. Trying to overcome the limitations posed by using off-the-shelf sentiment analysis tools, researchers recently started to develop their own tools for the software...

A recent research trend has emerged to identify developers' emotions, by applying sentiment analysis to the content of communication traces left in collaborative development environments. Trying to overcome the limitations posed by using off-the-shelf sentiment analysis tools, researchers recently started to develop their own tools for the software...

Software developers experience and share a wide range of emotions throughout a rich ecosystem of communication channels. A recent trend that has emerged in empirical software engineering studies is leveraging sentiment analysis of developers' communication traces. We release a dataset of 4,800 questions, answers, and comments from Stack Overflow, m...

Comments play an important role within online creative communities because they make it possible to foster the production and improvement of authors’ artifacts. We investigate how comment-based communication help shape members’ behavior within online creative communities. In this paper, we report the results of a preliminary study aimed at mining t...

EVALITA is a periodic evaluation campaign of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and speech tools for the Italian language. The general objective of EVALITA is to promote the development of language and speech technologies for the Italian language, providing a shared framework where different systems and approaches can be evaluated in a consistent ma...

On behalf of the Program Committee, a very warm welcome to the Fifth Italian Conference on Computational Linguistics (CLiC-­‐it 2018). This edition of the conference is held in Torino. The conference is locally organised by the University of Torino and hosted into its prestigious main lecture hall “Cavallerizza Reale”. The CLiC-­‐it conference seri...

EVALITA is a periodic evaluation campaign of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and speech tools for the Italian language. The general objective of EVALITA is to promote the development of language and speech technologies for the Italian language, providing a shared framework where different systems and approaches can be evaluated in a consistent ma...

EVALITA is a periodic evaluation campaign of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and speech tools for the Italian language. The general objective of EVALITA is to promote the development of language and speech technologies for the Italian language, providing a shared framework where different systems and approaches can be evaluated in a consistent ma...

Context: The success of Stack Overflow and other community-based question-and-answer (Q&A) sites depends mainly on the will of their members to answer others' questions. In fact, when formulating requests on Q&A sites, we are not simply seeking for information. Instead, we are also asking for other people's help and feedback. Understanding the dyna...

Context: The success of Stack Overflow and other community-based question-and-answer (Q&A) sites depends mainly on the will of their members to answer others' questions. In fact, when formulating requests on Q&A sites, we are not simply seeking for information. Instead, we are also asking for other people's help and feedback. Understanding the dyna...

The role of sentiment analysis is increasingly emerging to study software developers' emotions by mining crowd-generated content within social software engineering tools. However, off-the-shelf sentiment analysis tools have been trained on non-technical domains and general-purpose social media, thus resulting in misclassifications of technical jarg...

Emotion recognition from biometrics is relevant to a wide range of application domains, including healthcare. Existing approaches usually adopt multi-electrodes sensors that could be expensive or uncomfortable to be used in real-life situations. In this study, we investigate whether we can reliably recognize high vs. low emotional valence and arous...

We present EmoTxt, a toolkit for emotion recognition from text, trained and tested on a gold standard of about 9K question, answers, and comments from online interactions. We provide empirical evidence of the performance of EmoTxt. To the best of our knowledge, EmoTxt is the first open-source toolkit supporting both emotion recognition from text an...

Comments play an important role within online creative communities because they make it possible to foster the production and improvement of authors' artifacts. We investigate how comment-based communication help shape members' behavior within online creative communities. In this paper, we report the results of a preliminary study aimed at mining t...

Emotional arousal increases activation and performance but may also lead to burnout in software development. We present the first version of a Software Engineering Arousal lexicon (SEA) that is specifically designed to address the problem of emotional arousal in the software developer ecosystem. SEA is built using a bootstrapping approach that comb...

Establishing trust between developers working at distant sites facilitates team collaboration in distributed software development. While previous research has focused on how to build and spread trust in absence of direct, face-to-face communication, it has overlooked the effects of the propensity to trust, i.e., the trait of personality representin...

Context: Recently, more and more developer communities are abandoning their legacy support forums, moving onto Stack Overflow. The motivations are diverse, yet they typically include achieving faster response time and larger visibility through the access to a modern and very successful infrastructure. One downside of migration, however, is that the...

In this paper, we describe the overall goals and expected contribution of the EmoQuest project. EmoQuest is a three-year multi-disciplinary research project whose main goal is to understand the role of emotions in social media-based knowledge sharing, specifically in online Question and Answer (Q&A) sites. The main research domain of EmoQuest is Co...

EVALITA is the evaluation campaign of Natural Language Processing and Speech Tools for the Italian language: since 2007 shared tasks have been proposed covering the analysis of both written and spoken language with the aim of enhancing the development and dissemination of resources and technologies for Italian. EVALITA is an initiative of the Itali...

English. The huge amount of information streaming from online social networking is increasingly attracting the interest of researchers on sentiment analysis on micro-blogging platforms. We provide an overview on the open challenges of sentiment analysis on Italian tweets. We discuss methodological issues as well as new directions for investigation...

A recent research trend has emerged to study the role of affect in in the social programmer ecosystem, by applying sentiment analysis to the content available in sites such as GitHub and Stack Overflow. In this paper, we aim at assessing the suitability of a state-of-the-art sentiment analysis tool, already applied in social computing, for detectin...

Trust represents a key issue in building successful customer–supplier relationships. In this sense, social software represents a powerful means for fostering trust by establishing a direct, more personal communication channel with customers. Therefore, companies are now investing in social media for building their social digital brand and strengthe...

This paper describes the UNIBA team participation in the Sentiment Analysis in Twitter task (Task 10) at SemEval-2015. We propose a supervised approach relying on keyword, lexicon and micro-blogging features as well as representation of tweets in a word space.

Recent research has shown that drivers of success in online question answering encompass presentation quality as well as temporal and social aspects. Yet, we argue that also the emotional style of a technical contribution influences its perceived quality. In this paper, we investigate how Stack Overflow users can increase the chance of getting thei...