I am a PhD Candidate at the University of Bern in the Software Composition Group since January 2018. Prior to this, I have done masters in software system from the Birla Institute of Technology and Science-Pilani During my masters, I have worked on “Software Fault Tree Analysis” which is a safety analysis technique to identify a software-related error in early design phase from UML model.

Research Interest

As the complexity of software system increase, it becomes more important to tackle the future problem in the early stages. To support developers in building these complex systems we require tools which can support rapid development, understanding the system, re-using the existing system, reduce testing effort, and automate various tasks for them. My research interest lies in supporting developers with various tools in their IDEs. Currently I am working on gathering and identifying developers information needs regarding code comments for program comprehensions tasks.

Project Proposals

• Identify various kinds of information from class comments automatically
• How do code documentation efforts spread over class hierarchy?
• Identify the comment issues pointed out in the code review phase
• Identification of the class responsibility information from the Pharo class comments
• Searching code examples in IDE using natural language queries
• Derive the contextual information from developer’s questions
• Individual projects available on request.

Ongoing Thesis projects

• Survey of commenting conventions covered by style guidelines and the tools
• Adherence of class comments to the commenting style guidelines
• Generate Pharo class comments automatically

Finished Thesis projects

• Software Developers’ Information Needs
• Analysis of Developer Information Needs on Collaborative Platforms

Past Proposals

• Msc: Investigating developer’s questions using web scraping
• Bsc: Analyzing the inconsistency between comments and source code in Pharo
• Seminar: Plugin for Moose to Analyse Natural Language Questions
• Seminar: How do the class comments differ in common programming languages?
• Seminar: Assessing comments quality automatically in Pharo

Teaching Activities

• P2: Programming 2 — Object-Oriented Design
• SMA: Software Modeling and Analysis

Contact Details

Email: pooja.rani |at| inf.unibe.ch

Telephone: +41 31 511 7639

Address: University of Bern, Software Composition Group,
Room 106, Schützenmattstrasse 14, CH-3012 Bern

Webpage: http://scg.unibe.ch/staff/Pooja-Rani

Publications

2021

1. Pooja Rani. Speculative Analysis for Quality Assessment of Code Comments. In 2021 IEEE/ACM 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering: Companion Proceedings (ICSE-Companion), p. 299-303, 2021. DOI PDF →
2. Pooja Rani, Sebastiano Panichella, Manuel Leuenberger, Mohammad Ghafari, and Oscar Nierstrasz. What do class comments tell us? An investigation of comment evolution and practices in Pharo Smalltalk. In Empirical Software Engineering 26(6) p. 1—49, 2021. DOI PDF →
3. Mathias Birrer, Pooja Rani, Sebastiano Panichella, and Oscar Nierstrasz. Makar: A Framework for Multi-source Studies based on Unstructured Data. In 2021 IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER), p. 577-581, 2021. DOI PDF →
4. Pooja Rani, Sebastiano Panichella, Manuel Leuenberger, Andrea Di Sorbo, and Oscar Nierstrasz. How to Identify Class Comment Types? A Multi-language Approach for Class Comment Classification. In Journal of Systems and Software 181 p. 111047, 2021. DOI PDF →
5. Pooja Rani, Mathias Birrer, Sebastiano Panichella, Mohammad Ghafari, and Oscar Nierstrasz. What Do Developers Discuss about Code Comments?. In 2021 IEEE 21st International Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation (SCAM), 2021. PDF →
6. Pooja Rani, Suada Abuka, Nataliia Stulova, Alexander Bergel, and Oscar Nierstrasz. Do Comments follow Commenting Conventions? A Case Study in Java and Python. In 2021 IEEE 21st International Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation (SCAM), 2021. PDF →

2018

1. Pooja Rani. Software Analysis using Natural Language Queries. In Seminar Series on Advanced Techniques \& Tools for Software Evolution (SATToSE), 2018. PDF →