Rate My Professor Daniel Alencar da Costa

Dr. Daniel Alencar da Costa is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Information Science at the University of Otago's School of Computing, Sciences Division. He earned his Bachelor of Science degree from the University Centre of Pará (CESUPA), Belém, Brazil, in 2007. He completed his Master of Science in 2013 and Doctor of Philosophy in 2017 at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN), under the supervision of Professor Uirá Kulesza. During his PhD, he visited Queen's University in Canada for over two years, supervised by Professor Ahmed E. Hassan at the Software Analysis and Intelligence Lab (SAIL). Subsequently, he served as a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Software Reengineering Research Group at Queen's University, supervised by Professor Ying Zou, prior to taking up his position at the University of Otago.

His main academic specialty is Empirical Software Engineering, where he applies machine learning, statistics, and qualitative techniques such as surveys and interviews to study software development phenomena. The objectives of his research include augmenting software engineering knowledge and developing tools to optimize practices like release cycles and detect development bottlenecks. Key publications encompass 'Contrasting the Hyperparameter Tuning Impact Across Software Defect Prediction Scenarios' (IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 2025), 'On the need to monitor continuous integration practices' (Empirical Software Engineering, 2025), 'Just-in-Time crash prediction for mobile apps' (Empirical Software Engineering, 2024), 'Rapid vs. Traditional Release Cycles' (Empirical Software Engineering, 2018), 'Delivery Delay in Issue Reports' (Empirical Software Engineering, 2018), 'Continuous Integration Build Duration Prediction' (Empirical Software Engineering, 2019), 'Learning to Rank Pull Requests' (Empirical Software Engineering, 2019), and 'Questions Raised in Issue Reports' (Empirical Software Engineering, 2018). He received the ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award at the 13th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR 2016) for 'The impact of switching to a rapid release cycle on integration delay'. His empirical studies on continuous integration, defect prediction, release engineering, and issue handling contribute to improved practitioner decision-making in software development.