Related papers: Task Interruptions in Requirements Engineering: Re…
Modern science is relying on software more than ever. The behavior and outcomes of this software shape the scientific and public discourse on important topics like climate change, economic growth, or the spread of infections. Most…
Decision-making is a key software engineering skill. Developers constantly make choices throughout the software development process, from requirements to implementation. While prior work has studied developer decision-making, the choices…
Context: Forgetting is defined as a gradual process of losing information. Even though there are many studies demonstrating the effect of forgetting in software development, to the best of our knowledge, no study explores the impact of…
The aim of Reinforcement Learning (RL) in real-world applications is to create systems capable of making autonomous decisions by learning from their environment through trial and error. This paper emphasizes the importance of reward…
Code reuse is a widespread practice across software development projects, suggesting an inherent trust in the reused code. Yet, there is a lack of a fundamental understanding of developers' trust and how various factors mold their…
Background: Many decisions made in Software Engineering practices are intertemporal choices: trade-offs in time between closer options with potential short-term benefit and future options with potential long-term benefit. However, how…
Robustness is often regarded as a critical future challenge for real-world applications, where stability is essential. However, as models often learn tasks in a similar order, we hypothesize that easier tasks will be easier regardless of…
Human values, or what people hold important in their life, such as freedom, fairness, and social responsibility, often remain unnoticed and unattended during software development. Ignoring values can lead to values violations in software…
Human errors in performing security-critical tasks are typically blamed on the complexity of those tasks. However, such errors can also occur because of (possibly unexpected) sensory distractions. A sensory distraction that produces…
Background: The sensitivity of Requirements Engineering (RE) to the context makes it difficult to efficiently control problems therein, thus, hampering an effective risk management devoted to allow for early corrective or even preventive…
The well-known Task Elimination redesign principle suggests to remove unnecessary tasks from a process to improve on time and cost. Although there seems to be a general consensus that removing work can only improve the throughput time of…
The rise of large language models (LLMs) has led to dramatic improvements across a wide range of natural language tasks. Their performance on certain tasks can be further enhanced by incorporating test-time reasoning techniques. These…
Early theories of perception as probabilistic inference propose that uncertainty about the interpretation of sensory input is represented as a probability distribution over many interpretations -- a relatively complex representation.…
Understanding what a software engineer (a developer, an incident responder, a production engineer, etc.) is working on is a challenging problem -- especially when considering the more complex software engineering workflows in…
In order to solve today's complex problems in the world of software development, technical knowledge is no longer enough. Previous studies investigating and identifying non-technical skills of software engineers show that creative skills…
As neural language models achieve human-comparable performance on Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) and see widespread adoption, ensuring their robustness in real-world scenarios has become increasingly important. Current robustness…
Requirements volatility is a major issue in software (SW) development, causing problems such as project delays and cost overruns. Even though there is a considerable amount of research related to requirement volatility, the majority of it…
AI-based systems, currently driven largely by LLMs and tool-using agentic harnesses, are increasingly discussed as a possible threat to software engineering. Foundation models get stronger, agents can plan and act across multiple steps, and…
Weak alignment of requirements engineering (RE) with verification and validation (VV) may lead to problems in delivering the required products in time with the right quality. For example, weak communication of requirements changes to…
Reinforcement learning (RL) systems have countless applications, from energy-grid management to protein design. However, such real-world scenarios are often extremely difficult, combinatorial in nature, and require complex coordination…