Research Projects
Below are some research projects I have either completed or am currently working on in collaboration with academic/industry partners.
On-going: Understanding the Influence of Cognitive Capabilities on Software Development Tasks.
- I am leading the project in collaboration with Dr Sebastian Baltes and Professor John Grundy.
- In this research project, we are investigating how software practitioners’ cognitive capabilities might influence their software development tasks. By conducting an online survey as our first stage, we are focusing on identifying whether there is any relationship between these characteristics and successful software development tasks.
- The study is currently at the data collection stage [LinkedIn Post].
On-going: Performance Appraisal for Requirements Engineers
- This one-year project is carried out with final year undergraduate student team, under my supervision along with Professor John Grundy.
- As a future work arise from my PhD, this project focuses on creating a practical tool/plugin to enhance the performance appraisal process for requirements engineers (REs).
- This tool will be developed by integrating insights gained from industry practitioners and existing research on performance appraisal in software engineering, particularly in the domain of requirements engineering.
Completed: Software Team Members’ Personality on RE & Project Outcome – An Exploratory Case Study
- I led this project in collaboration with a software development team (anonymous), Prof John Grundy, A/Prof Rashina Hoda, and Dr Ingo Mueller.
- This was an exploratory case study conducted with a 11-member software development team, observing their team meetings, conducting follow-up interviews and analysing their personality profiles via standard personality test.
- Results: Identified potential impacts of team members’ diverse personality characteristics on RE-related activities, along with a set of strategies that may be useful in overcoming challenges occurred due diverse personalities. These findings may provide a guidance to software teams looking to manage the impact of software team members’ diverse personalities on RE and for researchers to investigate the impacts in diverse contexts.
- The paper based on this study was accepted and presented CHASE 2024 conference (in-person), Lisbon, Portugal in April 2024 [Preprint].
Completed: Influence of the Pandemic on Software Engineering Researchers
- In collaboration with Dr. Anuradha Madugalla (Project Lead), Dr. Tanjila Kanij, Associate Professor Rashina Hoda, Professor John Grundy, and Aastha Pant (PhD Student), I have primarily been involved in the data analysis, reporting, and paper writing phases of the project.
- The project aimed to understand the extent of the impact of pandemic on SE research by conducting surveys and interviews with SE researchers.
- A mixed methods approach- with common statistical methods adopted for quantitative analysis and socio-technical grounded theory for qualitative analysis.
- Results: There were many challenges faced by software engineering researchers during the pandemic, they overcame these challenges by adapting their methods of participant recruitment, data collection and study design. There are several benefits that were identified from conducting human based research during the pandemic and that 30% researchers did not wish to revert back to “the old ways” of doing human-based research.
- We present a model of how our study found that these challenges, adaptations and benefits are linked together. We provide several recommendations on how to conduct effective, remote human-based studies when face to face interaction is not possible due to situations such as pandemic or when remote participation is desired due to geographically diverse participants.
- The paper has been accepted to publish in Empirical Software Engineering (EMSE) journal [Preprint] [Project Summary].
