Publications (19)
MBSR at Work: Perspectives from an Instructor and Software Developers
Simone Romano, Alberto Conforti, Gloria Guidetti +3
In this paper, we present the preliminary findings from a qualitative study (i.e., semi-structured interviews) on how a Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program, carried o…
Researcher Bias in Software Engineering Experiments: a Qualitative Investigation
Simone Romano, Davide Fucci, Giuseppe Scanniello +3
Researcher Bias (RB) occurs when researchers influence the results of an empirical study based on their expectations.RB might be due to the use of Questionable Research Practices(Q…
CATTO: Just-in-time Test Case Selection and Execution
Dario Amoroso d'Aragona, Fabiano Pecorelli, Simone Romano +4
Regression testing ensures a System Under Test (SUT) still works as expected after changes to it. The simplest approach for regression testing consists of re-running the entire tes…
Normalized Loss Functions for Deep Learning with Noisy Labels
Xingjun Ma, Hanxun Huang, Yisen Wang +3
Robust loss functions are essential for training accurate deep neural networks (DNNs) in the presence of noisy (incorrect) labels. It has been shown that the commonly used Cross En…
A Family of Experiments on Test-Driven Development
Adrian Santos, Sira Vegas, Oscar Dieste +18
Context: Test-driven development (TDD) is an agile software development approach that has been widely claimed to improve software quality. However, the extent to which TDD improves…
PrediHealth: Telemedicine and Predictive Algorithms for the Care and Prevention of Patients with Chronic Heart Failure
Giuseppe De Filippo, Simranjit Singh, Gianpiero Sisto +8
The management of chronic heart failure presents significant challenges in modern healthcare, requiring continuous monitoring, early detection of exacerbations, and personalized tr…
Studying Test-Driven Development and its Retainment Over a Six-month Time Span
Maria Teresa Baldassarre, Danilo Caivano, Davide Fucci +4
In this paper, we investigate the effect of TDD, as compared to a non-TDD approach, as well as its retainment (or retention) over a time span of (about) six months. To pursue these…
The Effect of Noise on Sofware Engineers' Performance
Simone Romano, Giuseppe Scanniello, Davide Fucci +2
Background: Noise, defined as an unwanted sound, is one of the commonest factors that could affect people's performance in their daily work activities. The software engineering res…
A Framework to Adjust Dependency Measure Estimates for Chance
Simone Romano, Nguyen Xuan Vinh, James Bailey +1
Estimating the strength of dependency between two variables is fundamental for exploratory analysis and many other applications in data mining. For example: non-linear dependencies…
Augmenting Software Bills of Materials with Software Vulnerability Description: A Preliminary Study on GitHub
Davide Fucci, Massimiliano Di Penta, Simone Romano +1
Software Bills of Material (SBOMs) are becoming a consolidated, often enforced by governmental regulations, way to describe software composition. However, based on recent studies,…
Ground Truth Bias in External Cluster Validity Indices
Yang Lei, James C. Bezdek, Simone Romano +3
It has been noticed that some external CVIs exhibit a preferential bias towards a larger or smaller number of clusters which is monotonic (directly or inversely) in the number of c…
A Longitudinal Cohort Study on the Retainment of Test-Driven Development
Davide Fucci, Simone Romano, Maria Teresa Baldassarre +4
Background: Test-Driven Development (TDD) is an agile software development practice, which is claimed to boost both external quality of software products and developers' productivi…
Adjusting for Chance Clustering Comparison Measures
Simone Romano, Nguyen Xuan Vinh, James Bailey +1
Adjusted for chance measures are widely used to compare partitions/clusterings of the same data set. In particular, the Adjusted Rand Index (ARI) based on pair-counting, and the Ad…
JavaScript Dead Code Identification, Elimination, and Empirical Assessment
Ivano Malavolta, Kishan Nirghin, Gian Luca Scoccia +4
Web apps are built by using a combination of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. While building modern web apps, it is common practice to make use of third-party libraries and frameworks, a…
Need for Sleep: the Impact of a Night of Sleep Deprivation on Novice Developers' Performance
Davide Fucci, Giuseppe Scanniello, Simone Romano +1
We present a quasi-experiment to investigate whether, and to what extent, sleep deprivation impacts the performance of novice software developers using the agile practice of test-f…
Further Evidence on a Controversial Topic about Human-Based Experiments: Professionals vs. Students
Simone Romano, Francesco Paolo Sferratore, Giuseppe Scanniello
Most Software Engineering (SE) human-based controlled experiments rely on students as participants, raising concerns about their external validity. Specifically, the realism of res…
An Empirical Assessment on Affective Reactions of Novice Developers when Applying Test-Driven Development
Simone Romano, Davide Fucci, Maria Teresa Baldassarre +2
We study whether and in which phase Test-Driven Development (TDD) influences affective states of novice developers in terms of pleasure, arousal, dominance, and liking. We performe…
A Large Scale Empirical Study of the Impact of Spaghetti Code and Blob Anti-patterns on Program Comprehension
Cristiano Politowski, Foutse Khomh, Simone Romano +4
Context: Several studies investigated the impact of anti-patterns (i.e., "poor" solutions to recurring design problems) during maintenance activities and reported that anti-pattern…
Results from a replicated experiment on the affective reactions of novice developers when applying test-driven development
Simone Romano, Giuseppe Scanniello, Maria Teresa Baldassarre +2
Test-driven Development (TDD) is an incremental approach to software development. Despite it is claimed to improve both quality of software and developers' productivity, the resear…