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Reward design is a fundamental problem in reinforcement learning (RL). A misspecified or poorly designed reward can result in low sample efficiency and undesired behaviors. In this paper, we propose the idea of programmatic reward design,…
For decades now, it has been claimed that a way to improve software developers' productivity is to focus on people. Indeed, while human factors have been recognized in Software Engineering research, few empirical investigations have…
The application of incentives, such as reward and punishment, is a frequently applied way for promoting cooperation among interacting individuals in structured populations. However, how to properly use the incentives is still a challenging…
Incentives play an important role in (security and IT) risk management of a large-scale organization with multiple autonomous divisions. This paper presents an incentive mechanism design framework for risk management based on a…
Challenges related to development, deployment, and maintenance of reusable software for science are becoming a growing concern. Many scientists' research increasingly depends on the quality and availability of software upon which their…
Background: While bug bounty programs are not new in software development, an increasing number of companies, as well as open source projects, rely on external parties to perform the security assessment of their software for reward.…
The study of affects (i.e., emotions, moods) in the workplace has received a lot of attention in the last 15 years. Despite the fact that software development has been shown to be intellectual, creative, and driven by cognitive activities,…
An analyst is tasked with producing a statistical study. The analyst is not monitored and is able to manipulate the study. He can receive payments contingent on his report and trusted data collected from an independent source, modeled as a…
Empirical Standards are natural-language models of a scientific community's expectations for a specific kind of study (e.g. a questionnaire survey). The ACM SIGSOFT Paper and Peer Review Quality Initiative generated empirical standards for…
Gamification has been applied in software engineering to improve quality and results by increasing people's motivation and engagement. A systematic mapping has identified research gaps in the field, one of them being the difficulty of…
Empirical software engineering has received much attention in recent years and coined the shift from a more design-science-driven engineering discipline to an insight-oriented, and theory-centric one. Yet, we still face many challenges,…
Nowadays, rating systems play a crucial role in the attraction of customers for different services. However, as it is difficult to detect a fake rating, attackers can potentially impact the rating's aggregated score unfairly. This malicious…
CONTEXT: Self-efficacy is a concept researched in various areas of knowledge that impacts various factors such as performance, satisfaction, and motivation. In Software Engineering, it has mainly been studied in the academic context,…
Reinforcement learning provides an automated framework for learning behaviors from high-level reward specifications, but in practice the choice of reward function can be crucial for good results -- while in principle the reward only needs…
Throughout the years, social norms have been promoted as an informal enforcement mechanism for achieving beneficial collective outcomes. Among the most used methods to foster interactions, framing the context of a situation or setting…
Organizations that develop software have recognized that software process models are particularly useful for maintaining a high standard of quality. In the last decade, simulations of software processes were used in several settings and…
This paper investigates how software professionals perceive the economic implications of diversity in software engineering teams. Motivated by a gap in software engineering research, which has largely emphasized socio-technical and…
The time pressure associated with software development, among other factors, often leads to a diminished emotional state among developers. However, whether emotions affect perceived productivity remains an open question. This study aims to…
Unambiguous identification of the rewards driving behaviours of entities operating in complex open-ended real-world environments is difficult, partly because goals and associated behaviours emerge endogenously and are dynamically updated as…
Software is at the core of most scientific discoveries today. Therefore, the quality of research results highly depends on the quality of the research software. Rigorous testing, as we know it from software engineering in the industry,…