Mairieli Wessel

Assistant Professor
Radboud University

I am an assistant professor in the Department of Software Science at the Radboud University, The Netherlands. In 2021, I completed a Ph.D. in Computer Science at the Institute of Mathematics and Statistics (IME) of the University of São Paulo (USP). I research the intersections of Software Engineering (SE) and Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). Currently, I am working on the use of bots to support Open Source Software (OSS) communities. I am interested in Open Source Software, Human Aspects of Software Engineering, Empirical Software Engineering, and Mining Software Repositories techniques. Check my CV for more.

Are you a student looking for a supervisor? Are you a researcher and think that our interests overlap? I'm always looking for collaborations; you can reach me at mairieli.wessel[at]ru.nl.


Education

PhD Student

University of Sao Paulo
PhD Student at Department of Computer Science at the Institute of Mathematics and Statistics (IME) under the supervision of prof. Marco A. Gerosa
Feb 2018 - Aug 2021

Bachelor Degree

Federal University of Technology - Paraná

Monograph topic: Tweaking Association Rules to Optimize Software Change Recommendations. (In Portuguese)

Feb 2014 - Dec 2017

Professional Experience

Assistant Professor

Radboud University
Assistant Professor (UD) at the Software Science Department
Jul 2022 - Until now

Postdoctoral Researcher

Delft University of Technology
Postdoctoral Researcher at the Software Engineering Research Group with Prof. Andy Zaidman.
Sep 2021 - Jun 2022

Visiting Period

Concordia University
Visiting PhD Student at the Data-driven Analysis of Software (DAS) Lab, under the supervision of prof. Emad Shihab.
Feb 2021 - Jul 2021

IBM Research

Research intern

Graduate research intern at the Conversational Intelligence group at IBM Research laboratory in Brazil.

Apr 2019 - Feb 2020

Mactus

FullStack Developer

Web stack and native application stack developer.

Jan 2012 - Dec 2017

4Makers

Instructor

Robotics STEM Instructor for primary students.

Jan 2017 - Dec 2017

Publications

Ph.D. Dissertation


Book Chapters


Journal Papers


Peer Reviewed Conference Papers


Peer Reviewed Workshop Papers

Prospective Students

Software development bots are revolutionizing how developers work. Bots are used to bridge the gap between human collaborative software development and automated processes, alleviating the software development workload, improving productivity, and enabling use cases for which humans are not realistically suitable. On social coding platforms, such as GitHub, a bot acts autonomously, has a user account, and plays a role within the development team, executing quality checks or welcoming novice contributors. On developers' communication channels (e.g., Slack), (chat)bots have conversational skills and can promptly reply to commands or questions like "what is the bug introduced because of commit hash ab3hdu6gtf?"

While the usage of bots for software development-related tasks seems very promising, there is still some ground to cover to understand its impacts and make it fully usable. Our goal is to design tools (e.g., bots, chatbots) and create insights and guidelines that practitioners and the research community might leverage.

I am continuously looking for motivated bachelors and masters students to work with me. Down below you can find different research projects I offer. All projects are research-focused. In each one you will:
1. Research literature about your topic area
2. Employ the most suitable research method (e.g., mining software repositories techniques, large-scale surveys, statistical analysis, interviews) to address the research goal
3. Learn how to write all of it down as a research paper

Getting in touch: If you want to know more about the specific project write me an email! The list of research projects is not exhaustive, though. You are welcome to bring your own research idea.

Project Ideas
  • (reserved!) Developing a tool to identify “bad smells” in bot comments
    While bots are useful for automating a variety of tasks related to software development, prior research has shown that their verbose outputs have the potential side-effect of disrupting developers in their work.
    Project's goal: Automatically identify and categorize patterns in bot comments that possibly indicate a need for redesign.
    Questions: What are the most common problems related to bot comments? How often do bot comments smell bad?

  • Investigating the impact of tool migration
    Recently, an easy, reusable, and portable way to automate development workflows on GitHub was made possible by the advent of GitHub Actions. Several repositories that previously used bots have migrated to Actions. Tool migration, however, can bring consequences that differ from the expectations of the technology designers and adopters.
    Project's goal: Understand how the dynamics of pull request activities change following a tool migration.
    Questions: How do pull request activities change after a repository migrates from one tool to another?

  • (reserved!) Developing a bot activity tracker
    A dashboard would help open-source developers who work on several GitHub repositories to have a common interface to monitor bots’ actions.
    Project's goal: Develop a tool (e.g. dashboard) to keep track of bot activities in one or more GitHub repositories.
    Questions: How can developers better visualize the activities bots perform in their repositories? What metrics are relevant to be shown?

Mentoring

Ph.D. Students
  • Jonan Richards
    [Ph.D. candidate @ Radboud University, The Netherlands - joined in July 2024]

  • Ana Claudia Maciel
    [Ph.D. candidate @ Universidade Estadual de Maringá, Brazil - co-supervision - joined in September 2021]


Services

Editorial

Guest Editor of the Special Issue on Bots in Software Engineering, IEEE Software, 2021

Organizing Committees

General Chair of the 22nd Belgium-Netherlands Software Evolution Workshop (BENEVOL 2023)
Co-Chair of the Data & Tools Showcase track (MSR 2023)
Co-Chair of the Registered reports track (CHASE 2023)
Program Committee Co-Chair of the 21st Belgium-Netherlands Software Evolution Workshop (BENEVOL 2022)
Organizer of the 4th International Workshop on Bots in Software Engineering (BotSE 2022)
Video Co-Chair of the International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC 2021)
Organizer of the 3rd International Workshop on Bots in Software Engineering (BotSE 2021)

Journal Reviewer

Manuscript Reviewer of the Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM), 2021
Manuscript Reviewer of the Empirical Software Engineering (EMSE), 2021, 2022
Manuscript Reviewer of the PeerJ Computer Science, 2021
Manuscript Reviewer of the Journal of Systems & Software (JSS), 2020, 2022

Program Committees

Committee Member of the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2024)
Committee Member of the ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE 2023)
Committee Member of the Brazilian Symposium on Collaborative Systems (SBSC 2023)
Committee Member of the International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC 2023)
Committee Member of the 18th International Conference on Open Source Systems (OSS 2022)
Committee Member of the 36th Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering (SBES 2022) - Education Track
Committee Member of the 36th Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering (SBES 2022) - Technical Track
Associate Chair of the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Designing Interactive Systems (DIS 2022)
Committee Member of the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Global Software Engineering (ICGSE 2022)
Committee Member of the International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC 2022)
Committee Member of the ACM/IEEE MSR Challenge Track, 2022
Committee Member of the ACM/IEEE ICSE Artifact Evaluation, 2022
Committee Member HCAI: Human Centered AI Workshop, 2021
Shadow PC Member of the ACM/IEEE Mining Software Repositories Conference (MSR 2021)
Committee Member of the 2nd International Workshop on Bots in Software Engineering (BotSE 2020)

External Reviews

Reviewer of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2022)
Sub-reviewer of the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2022)
Sub-reviewer of the ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work (GROUP 2022)
Reviewer of the ACM Conference on Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW 2021)
Sub-reviewer of the Workshop sobre Aspectos Sociais, Humanos e Econômicos de Software (WASHES 2020)
Reviewer of the ACM CHI Late-Breaking Works, 2020
Sub-reviewer of the ACM/IEEE International Workshop on Bots in Software Engineering (BotSE 2019)

Student Volunteer

The 15th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Global Software Engineering (ICGSE 2020)


Awards & Funding

Awards
  • Best Runner-up Paper Award at International Conference on Automation of Software Test (AST 2024)
  • Distinguished Reviewer Award at International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC 2024)
  • Distinguished Reviewer Award at Mining Software Repositories Conference (MSR 2024)
  • 1st Place in the Doctoral Theses Competition (CTD-ES) of the Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering (SBES)
  • ICSME 2020 IEEE TCSE Distinguished Paper Award
  • Best Class Performance Award in the Undergraduate Degree in Computer Science at Federal University of Technology - Paraná

Funding
  • NWO Meetings and Consultations for BENEVOL 2023
  • Scholarship from the Emerging Leaders in the Americas Program (ELAP) (2021)
  • SIGSOFT Travel Grants ICSE 2019 Student Mentoring Workshop (SMeW)
  • Scholarship from the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) (2018 - 2021)

Contact Information

Dr. Mairieli Wessel
Email: mairieli.wessel[at]ru.nl

Office:
Institute for Computing and Information Sciences
Radboud University
Toernooiveld 212, room 1.08a (Mercator building)
6525 EC Nijmegen
The Netherlands