Rate My Professor Sherlock Licorish

Associate Professor Sherlock Licorish serves in the Department of Information Science within the School of Computing at the University of Otago. He earned his BSc from the University of Otago, an MSc, and a PhD from Auckland University of Technology. Throughout his career at Otago, he has advanced from Senior Lecturer to Associate Professor, contributing to the academic community through teaching courses such as INFO 301 Applied Project, INFO 302 Information Systems Strategy and Governance, INFO 490 Honours dissertation research projects, and COMP 210 Information Assurance. Licorish actively supervises postgraduate students, having guided numerous PhD, MSc, and Honours candidates to completion, including recent PhD graduates Fathima Nuzla Ismail and Saurabh Malgaonkar. He has been recognized with a Supervisor Award for his mentorship excellence.

Licorish's research centers on empirical software engineering and software analytics. His specializations encompass modelling software development processes and evaluating methodologies, particularly agile practices; examining software teams' behaviors and performance in activities like defect resolution, feature building, requirements gathering, and maintenance; developing tools to support developers and integrate end-user feedback through market-driven and crowd-sourced requirements engineering; and investigating code quality, fault detection and repair, static analysis tools, global software development, open source software communities, and virtual developer networks. He applies advanced techniques including data mining, data visualization, statistical analysis, social network analysis, linguistic and sentiment analysis, natural language processing, probabilistic modelling, qualitative content analysis, and dilemma analysis to large software repositories. With 3,645 citations and 149 publications documented across platforms like Google Scholar and ResearchGate, his contributions significantly influence the fields of software engineering and information systems development. Notable publications include 'Students’ perception of Kahoot!’s influence on teaching and learning' (2018, 955 citations), '"Go Kahoot!” Enriching classroom engagement, motivation and learning experience with games' (2017, 199 citations), 'Technical debt and agile software development practices and processes: An industry practitioner survey' (2018, 142 citations), 'Understanding the effect of agile practice quality on software product quality' (2025, IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering), 'Comprehensive predictive analytics for collaborators’ answers, code quality, and dropout: Stack Overflow case study' (2025, Empirical Software Engineering), and 'Stack Overflow’s hidden nuances: How does zip code define user contribution?' (2025, Journal of Systems & Software). Licorish serves as a reviewer for leading conferences and journals, enhancing scholarly discourse in his domains.