About Me
Hey there! My name is Amirali, and I'm a computer science PhD student. I research the process of software engineering and the people involved in that process to make software more secure. I started my studies at Drexel University, working with Dr. Preetha Chatterjee in SOAR Lab in 2022. Besides working on a various research projects, I am preparing to take my candidacy exam later this year!
Research Interests
- Software Engineering
- Software Security
- Natural Language Processing
- Human Factors in Software Engineering
My research interests mainly lie in software engineering, software security, and natural language processing. I am currently focused on developing a better understing of the human factors contributing to open source security. In doing so, I leverage machine learning and NLP techniques for processing and analyzing developers' communications.
Publications
Interpersonal Trust in OSS: Exploring Dimensions of Trust in GitHub Pull
Requests
Amirali Sajadi, K. Damevski, and P. Chatterjee,
Proceedings of the 45th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), New Ideas
and Emerging Results Track,
May 2023 (Acceptance rate: 22%)
Read Abstract | Preprint
Interpersonal trust plays a crucial role in facilitating collaborative tasks, such as software development. While previous research recognizes the significance of trust in an organizational setting, there is a lack of understanding in how trust is exhibited in OSS distributed teams, where there is an absence of direct, in-person communications. To foster trust and collaboration in OSS teams, we need to understand what trust is and how it is exhibited in written developer communications (e.g., pull requests, chats). In this paper, we first investigate various dimensions of trust to identify the ways trusting behavior can be observed in OSS. Next, we sample a set of 100 GitHub pull requests from Apache Software Foundation (ASF) projects, to analyze and demonstrate how each dimension of trust can be exhibited. Our findings provide preliminary insights into cues that might be helpful to automatically assess team dynamics and establish interpersonal trust in OSS teams, leading to successful and sustainable OSS.
Towards Understanding Emotions in Informal Developer Interactions: A Gitter Chat
Study
Amirali Sajadi, K. Damevski, and P. Chatterjee,
The 31st ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations
of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE),
Ideas, Visions and Reflections Track, Dec 2023
Read Abstract | Preprint
Emotions play a significant role in teamwork and collaborative activities like software development. While researchers have analyzed developer emotions in various software artifacts (e.g., issues, pull requests), few studies have focused on understanding the broad spectrum of emotions expressed in chats. As one of the most widely used means of communication, chats contain valuable information in the form of informal conversations, such as negative perspectives about adopting a tool. In this paper, we present a dataset of developer chat messages manually annotated with a wide range of emotion labels (and sub-labels), and analyze the type of information present in those messages. We also investigate the unique signals of emotions specific to chats and distinguish them from other forms of software communication. Our findings suggest that chats have fewer expressions of Approval and Fear but more expressions of Curiosity compared to GitHub comments. We also notice that Confusion is frequently observed when discussing programming-related information such as unexpected software behavior. Overall, our study highlights the potential of mining emotions in developer chats for supporting software maintenance and evolution tools.