Cum Laude PhD for Nathan Cassee

04-Dec-2024

On October 31, 2024 Nathan Cassee has successfully defended his PhD thesis cum laude. At Eindhoven University of Technology cum laude is very rare - only 5% best PhD students get this predicate and the selection goes through multiple rounds of expert evaluation.

The goal of the thesis was to understand how expressions of emotions and opinions affect software engineering. This goal has been achieved by (a) identifying gaps in the state-of-the-art research (Chapter 2), (b) sharpening sentiment analysis tools used in software engineering (Chapters 3 and 4) and (c) obtaining profound insights in sentiment as a proxy for prioritization of technical debt (Chapters 5 and 6).

The thesis is highly innovative both in terms of application and in terms of the research methods applied. It has pioneered the research on application of sentiment analysis to technical debt. While technical debt is prevalent in the software industry and has been discussed in the software engineering literature before, understanding its prioritization remained elusive, hindering support of industry practitioners. Nathan’s work is the first one to explore the interplay between expressed negativity, priority of the SATD, and the contents of SATD, enabling such support. The analysis presented in the thesis is exceptional in terms of spectrum of the techniques employed, innovative character of the analysis and methodological rigor.

Dr. Cassee has been supervised by prof. dr. Alexander Serebrenik (Eindhoven University of Technology) and prof. dr. Nicole Novielli (University of Bari, Italy). Upon completing his PhD Dr. Cassee will join University of Victoria (Canada) as a postdoctoral researcher.

For the interested ones, the full text of Nathan’s PhD dissertation is available here.