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

He earned PhD from Athens University of Economics and Business, Athens, Greece with a specialization 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 has 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

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PhD

He defended his PhD thesis titled "Extending Maintainability Analysis Beyond Code Smells" on May 2, 2019. His PhD defense presentation can be below and the thesis can be found here.

 

News

• He has joined the Faculty of Computer Science at Dalhousie University as an assitant professor in Sept 2021.
• He served as the PI of DARPA AMP MINDSIGHT team (Siemens, JHU/APL, BAE, UC Irvine).

Recent publications

• "Green AI: Do Deep Learning Frameworks Have Different Costs?", Dec 2021, Accepted at ICSE 2022 (Research track). Preprint
• "A Survey on Machine Learning Techniques for Source Code Analysis", Oct 2021, Available on Arxiv.
• X-SBR: On the Use of the History of Refactorings for Explainable Search-Based Refactoring and Intelligent Change Operators, Aug 2021, Accepted at Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE).
• "Source code synthesis for domain specific languages from natural language text", patent application filed (US).
• "A Multi-Agent Reinforcement Learning Framework for Intelligent Manufacturing with Autonomous Mobile Robots", Apr 2021, Accepted in ICED 21.
• "Code Smell Detection by Deep Learning and Transfer Learning", Mar 2021, Accepted in Journal of Systems and Software. Preprint
• "Architecture Smells and Pareto Principle: A Preliminary Empirical Exploration" Feb 2021, Accepted in MSR 2021 (Research track). Preprint
• "QScored: A Large Dataset of Code Smells and Quality Metrics", Feb 2021, Accepted in MSR 2021 (Data showcase track). Preprint
• "Do We Need Improved Code Quality Metrics?" Dec 2020. Arxiv
• "Understanding and Characterizing Changes in Bugs Priority : The Practitioners' Perceptive", at SCAM 2020.
• "QScored: An Open Platform for Code Quality Ranking and Visualization", Accepted in ICSME Tool Demo track, July 2020. Preprint
• An empirical investigation on the relationship between design and architecture smells", Accepted in EMSE, June 2020. Preprint
• "On the Feasibility of Transfer-learning Code Smells using Deep Learning", April 2019. Available on Arxiv.
• "How Deep is the Mud: Fathoming Architecture Technical Debt Using Designite" at Tech Debt conference 2019. Preprint
• "Smelly Relations: Measuring and Understanding Database Schema Quality" at ICSE SEIP 2018. Preprint
• "A survey on software smells" at Journal of Systems and Software. Jan 2018.
• "House of Cards: Code Smells in Open-source C# Repositories" at ESEM 2017.
• "Designite: A Customizable Tool for Smell Mining in C# Repositories" at SATToSE 2017.

Teaching

• CSCI 5308 - Advance topics in software development (Winter 2022)
• CSCI 3130 - Software engineering (Summer 2022)

Service

• Editorial board member of JSS
• PC Co-chair of Student Research Competition at FSE 2021, TechDebt (research track) 2022, and ASE (Industry showcase) 2022 .
• PC member of SCAM 2022, MSR 2022 FOSS awards, ICSME 2022 (Tools demo), SCAM 2021, MSR 2021 FOSS awards, FSE 2021 (Industry track), ICSME 2021 (Tool demo track), MSR Data showcase 2021, TechDebt 2021, SANER 2021, ICPC 2021, ISEC 2021, SATToSE 2020, SEAA 2020 Software Analytics: Mining Software Open Datasets and Repositories, MSR 2020 Mining Challenge, ISEC 2020, MSR 2018 Data Showcase track.
• Steering committee member of SATToSE.
• Organized SATToSE 2018.
• Reviewer for Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE), Journal of Systems and Software (JSS), Information and Software Technology (IST), IET Software, and Software Quality Journal.
• Reviewer for ACM Computing Reviews
  • Decoding the representation of code in the brain: an fMRI study of code review and expertise.
  • Website hosting and migration with Amazon Web Services : a practical guide to moving your website to AWS
  • Building web applications with Visual Studio 2017 : using .NET core and modern JavaScript frameworks
• Sub-reviewer for ESEM 2017, MSR 2017, OSS 2017, TDA 2016, ICPC 2016, OSS 2016, ICSE SEIP 2016.

Talks

• 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.

 

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