Tushar

Tushar Sharma is an assistant professor at Dalhousie University, Canada. The topics related to software design and architecture, refactoring, software code quality, technical debt, and machine learning for software engineering (ML4SE) define his career interests.

He earned PhD from Athens University of Economics and Business, Athens, Greece, specializing in software engineering in May 2019. Earlier, he obtained an MS in Computer Science from the Indian Institute of Technology-Madras, Chennai, India. His professional experience includes working with Siemens Research (formally, Siemens Technology), Charlotte, USA for approximately two years (2019-2021) as well as Siemens Corporate Technology, Bangalore, India for more than seven years (2008-2015). He was the principal investigator for MINDSIGHT team of DARPA AMP program consisting of researchers from Siemens, JHU/APL, BAE systems, and UC Irvine. He co-authored Refactoring for Software Design Smells: Managing Technical Debt and two Oracle Java certification books. He founded and developed Designite which is a software design quality assessment tool used by many practitioners and researchers worldwide. He is an IEEE Senior Member.

He can be reached at tushar@dal.ca.

 

Funded PhD positions at SMART lab@Dalhousie University

If you see your research career in software engineering (specifically but not limited to, software quality, refactoring, code synthesis, and applied machine learning and NLP for SE), consider expressing your interest for the positions using this form.

 

News

  • Sept 2024: Media coverage: "This Dal researcher wants to ensure AI doesn’t ruin the environment"
  • Aug 2024: Mitacs Accelerate grant: "Fine-tuning an LLM for patent drafting" ($30K); industry partner: XLSCOUT.
  • Jun 2024: Media coverage: by Daniel Shea about our paper "Code Smell Detection by Deep Direct-Learning and Transfer Learning"-one of the top-cited papers in Journal of systems and software since 2021.
  • Mar 2024: Digital Research Alliance of Canada (DRA) granted computing resources worth more than $51K via Resource Allocation Competition, Co-PI with Dr. Masud Rahman.
  • Mar 2024: Mitacs Accelerate grant: "Exploring the connection between internal and external software quality attributes" ($225K); industry partner: Spokesfan.
  • Mar 2024: Mitacs Accelerate grant: "Subsystem Optimization of Intelligent Automated Distribution Kiosk" ($15K).
  • Sept 2023: Best artifact award for our paper "Calibrating Deep Learning-based Code Smell Detection using Human Feedback" in SCAM 2023.
  • Sept 2023: Lab2Market grant for CoderGate.
  • May 2023: Canada First Research Excellence Fund (CFREF) accepted to fund "Transforming Climate Action: Addressing the Missing Ocean" for $154 million for the next seven years. Glad to be one of the 170 researchers' team from Dalhousie to participate in this program.
  • Apr 2023: Discovery grant proposal - "DevQOps: A Continuous Software Quality Assurance Framework", Accepted to be funded for five years by NSERC.
  • Jan 2023: Lab2Market grant for QConnect.
  • Sept 2021: He joined the Faculty of Computer Science at Dalhousie University, Canada as an assitant professor.
  • Mar-Aug 2021: He served as the PI of DARPA AMP MINDSIGHT team (Siemens, JHU/APL, BAE, UC Irvine).
  • Oct 2019: He joined Siemens Research (formally, Siemens Technology), Charlotte, USA.
  • May 2019: He defended his PhD thesis titled "Extending Maintainability Analysis Beyond Code Smells". Thesis.

Recent publications

You may find the complete list of publications here.

Teaching

Service

Talks

  • "Looking Deep Learning Frameworks Through Sustainability Lens" at 2022 CTRI Research Day on Aug 11, 2022.
  • Smelling Source Code Using Deep Learning at FOSDEM 2019.
  • A workshop on technical debt at Citrix, Banglore on Nov 12, 2018.
  • "Tracking Smells for Effective Maintainability Improvements" on Oct 6, 2018 at Software Architects meetup, Bangalore.
  • A session on TDD at Microsoft development center, Hyderabad on Aug 27, 2018.
  • "How deep is the mud: Identifying technical debt using Eclipse JDT" at Eclipse Day India on Sept 22, 2018
  • Talk at Technical Agility Conference, Bangalore - "Does Your Architecture Smell?"
  • "Understanding and Improving Software Quality" at Singular Logic, Athens on May 11, 2018
  • "What I Learned about Code Smells from Studying ~700 Studies" Programming Language seminar at University of Athens on Dec 29, 2017
  • "Understanding smells for higher software quality" at Singular Logic, Athens on Sept 5, 2017.
  • "Does your configuration code smell?" at FOSDEM, Brussels on Feb 4, 2017.