EDBT 2026 Demo / reviewers in the wild / expert
Thomas Zimmermann 0001
dblp:19/3622-1 · also Tom Zimmermann 0001
· DBLP profile ↗
7ranked-venue papers in the field
0as first author
2since 2021 · last 2026
0000-0003-4905-1469ORCID · conflict
Domains — venue-derived; a paper can count in several
Other / Interdisciplinary · 6Big Data, Cloud & Distributed Data Systems · 1
| Year | Publication | Venue | Position |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | Understanding Dominant Themes in Reviewing Agentic AI-authored CodeabstractWhile prior work has examined the generation capabilities of Agentic AI systems, little is known about how reviewers respond to AI-authored code in practice. In this paper, we present a large-scale empirical study of code review dynamics in agent-generated PRs. Using a curated subset of the AIDev dataset, we analyze 19,450 inline review comments spanning 3,177 agent-authored PRs from real-world GitHub repositories. We first derive a taxonomy of 12 review comment themes using topic modeling combined with large language model (LLM)-assisted semantic clustering and consolidation. According to this taxonomy, we then investigate whether zero-shot prompts to LLM can reliably annotate review comments. Our evaluation against human annotations shows that open-source LLM achieves reasonably high exact match (78.63%), macro F1 score (0.78), and substantial agreement with human annotators at the review comment level. At the PR level, the LLM also correctly identifies the dominant review theme with 78% Top-1 accuracy and achieves an average Jaccard similarity of 0.76, indicating strong alignment with human judgments. Applying this annotation pipeline at scale, we find that apart from functional correctness and logical changes, reviews of agent-authored PRs predominantly focus on documentation gaps, refactoring needs, styling and formatting issues, with testing and security-related concerns. These findings suggest that while AI agents can accelerate code production, there remain gaps requiring targeted human review oversight. Md. Asif Haider, Thomas Zimmermann 0001 |
MSR | 2 |
| 2025 | Prompting in the Wild: An Empirical Study of Prompt Evolution in Software RepositoriesabstractThe adoption of Large Language Models (LLMs) is reshaping software development as developers integrate these LLMs into their applications. In such applications, prompts serve as the primary means of interacting with LLMs. Despite the widespread use of LLM-integrated applications, there is limited understanding of how developers manage and evolve prompts. This study presents the first empirical analysis of prompt evolution in LLM-integrated software development. We analyzed 1,262 prompt changes across 243 GitHub repositories to investigate the patterns and frequencies of prompt changes, their relationship with code changes, documentation practices, and their impact on system behavior. Our findings show that developers primarily evolve prompts through additions and modifications, with most changes occurring during feature development. We identified key challenges in prompt engineering: only $21.9 \%$ of prompt changes are documented in commit messages, changes can introduce logical inconsistencies, and misalignment often occurs between prompt changes and LLM responses. These insights emphasize the need for specialized testing frameworks, automated validation tools, and improved documentation practices to enhance the reliability of LLM-integrated applications. Mahan Tafreshipour, Aaron Imani, Eduardo Santana de Almeida, Thomas Zimmermann 0001, Iftekhar Ahmed 0001 |
MSR | 5 |
| 2020 | Analyzing Web Search Behavior for Software Engineering TasksabstractWeb search plays an integral role in software engineering (SE) to help with various tasks such as finding documentation, debugging, installation, etc. In this work, we present the first large-scale analysis of web search behavior for SE tasks using the search query logs from Bing, a commercial web search engine. First, we use distant supervision to build a machine learning classifier to extract the SE search queries with an F1 score of 93%. We then perform an analysis on one million search sessions to understand how software engineering related queries and sessions differ from other queries and sessions. Subsequently, we propose a taxonomy of intents to identify the various contexts in which web search is used in software engineering. Lastly, we analyze millions of SE queries to understand the distribution, search metrics and trends across these SE search intents. Our analysis shows that SE related queries form a significant portion of the overall web search traffic. Additionally, we found that there are six major intent categories for which web search is used in software engineering. The techniques and insights can not only help improve existing tools but can also inspire the development of new tools that aid in finding information for SE related tasks. Nikitha Rao, Chetan Bansal, Thomas Zimmermann 0001, Ahmed Awadallah 0001, Nachiappan Nagappan |
IEEE BigData | 3 |
| 2020 | The State of the ML-universe: 10 Years of Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning Software Development on GitHubabstractIn the last few years, artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) have become ubiquitous terms. These powerful techniques have escaped obscurity in academic communities with the recent onslaught of AI & ML tools, frameworks, and libraries that make these techniques accessible to a wider audience of developers. As a result, applying AI & ML to solve existing and emergent problems is an increasingly popular practice. However, little is known about this domain from the software engineering perspective. Many AI & ML tools and applications are open source, hosted on platforms such as GitHub that provide rich tools for large-scale distributed software development. Despite widespread use and popularity, these repositories have never been examined as a community to identify unique properties, development patterns, and trends. Danielle Gonzalez, Thomas Zimmermann 0001, Nachiappan Nagappan |
MSR | 2 |
| 2015 | The Uniqueness of Changes: Characteristics and ApplicationsabstractChanges in software development come in many forms. Some changes are frequent, idiomatic, or repetitive (e.g. Adding checks for nulls or logging important values) while others are unique. We hypothesize that unique changes are different from the more common similar (or non-unique) changes in important ways, they may require more expertise or represent code that is more complex or prone to mistakes. As such, these unique changes are worthy of study. In this paper, we present a definition of unique changes and provide a method for identifying them in software project history. Based on the results of applying our technique on the Linux kernel and two large projects at Microsoft, we present an empirical study of unique changes. We explore how prevalent unique changes are and investigate where they occur along the architecture of the project. We further investigate developers' contribution towards uniqueness of changes. We also describe potential applications of leveraging the uniqueness of change and implement two of those applications, evaluating the risk of changes based on uniqueness and providing change recommendations for non-unique changes. Baishakhi Ray, Meiyappan Nagappan, Christian Bird, Nachiappan Nagappan, Thomas Zimmermann 0001 |
MSR | 5 |
| 2008 | Extracting structural information from bug reportsabstractIn software engineering experiments, the description of bug reports is typically treated as natural language text, although it often contains stack traces, source code, and patches. Neglecting such structural elements is a loss of valuable information; structure usually leads to a better performance of machine learning approaches. In this paper, we present a tool called infoZilla that detects structural elements from bug reports with near perfect accuracy and allows us to extract them. We anticipate that infoZilla can be used to leverage data from bug reports at a different granularity level that can facilitate interesting research in the future. Nicolas Bettenburg, Rahul Premraj, Thomas Zimmermann 0001, Sunghun Kim 0001 |
MSR | 3 |
| 2008 | Mining usage expertise from version archivesabstractIn software development, there is an increasing need to find and connect developers with relevant expertise. Existing expertise recommendation systems are mostly based on variations of the Line 10 Rule: developers who changed a file most often have the most implementation expertise. In this paper, we introduce the concept of usage expertise, which manifests itself whenever developers are using functionality, e.g., by calling API methods. We present preliminary results for the ECLIPSE project that demonstrate that our technique allows to recommend experts for files with no or little history, identify developers with similar expertise, and measure the usage of API methods. David Schuler, Thomas Zimmermann 0001 |
MSR | 2 |