Keynotes - CHASE 2024

Sun 14 - Mon 15 April 2024 Lisbon, Portugal

co-located with ICSE 2024

Nicole Novielli - A Journey Into the Emotions of Software Developers
Emotions are part of our everyday life and are known to impact cognitive skills, thus influencing job performance. This is true also for software development, an intellectual activity requiring creativity and problem-solving skills that are known to be influenced by affective states. In particular, early recognition of negative emotions, such as stress or frustration can enable just-in-time intervention for developers and team managers, in order to prevent burnout and undesired turnover. In this talk, I will provide an overview of recent research findings on developers’ emotions and their relationship with self-assessed productivity. Next, I will argue in favor of the emergence of tools to support developers’ emotion awareness at the individual and team level to improve productivity, resilience to failures and wellbeing.
	Nicole Novielli is an Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Bari, Italy. Her research interests lie at the intersection of software engineering and affective computing with a specific focus on emotion mining from software repositories, natural language processing of developers’ communication traces, and biometric recognition of developers’ emotions. She was the Program co-Chair of the 19th Int. Conf. on Mining Software Repositories (MSR 2022) and the 30th IEEE Int. Conf. on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER 2023). She is a member of the editorial board of the Empirical Software Engineering journal (Springer) and the Journal of Systems and Software (Elsevier).

Paul Ralph - The Surprising Implications of Realism for Human Factors Research
Many of the practical, methodological challenges faced by human factors researchers are rooted in outdated philosophical assumptions. Understanding newer philosophical approaches, especially critical realism, can help us solve many fundamental challenges associated with positivism, falsifications, interpretivism, and postmodernism. Realism is a family of philosophical approaches emphasizing that: (1) a real world exists independently of our perceptions of it; (2) the real world is filled with objects that have the power cause changes in each other, whether or not humans can or do observe these changes; (3) many observable phenomena are caused by unobservable structures. Meanwhile inferring unobservable structures based on what can be observed is both fundamentally challenging and central to human factors research. In this talk, Dr. Ralph will give an overview of critical realism and explore its implications for human factors research, focusing on practical applications for diverse qualitative and quantitative research methods.
	Dr. D. Paul Ralph, PhD (British Columbia), B.Sc. / B.Comm (Memorial), is an award-winning scientist, author, consultant, and Professor of Software Engineering at Dalhousie University. His cutting-edge research at the intersection of software engineering, human-computer interaction, and project management explores the relationship between software teams’ social dynamics and success. It has been used by many leading technology companies including Adobe, Amazon, AT&T, Canon, Bea Systems, IBM, Google, HP, Microsoft, Netflix, PayPal, Samsung, Salesforce, VMWare, Yahoo!, and Walmart. Dr. Ralph has published more than 80 peer-reviewed articles in premier venues including IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering and the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering. Dr. Ralph is editor-in-chief of the SIGSOFT Empirical Standards for Software Engineering Research, the comprehensive evidence standards for software engineering research.