Tiago Massoni
Associate Professor in Computer Science
E-mail: massoni@computacao.ufcg.edu.br
Twitter: @tiagomassoni
ORCID: 0000-0002-9423-7556
Head of the Software Practices Lab.
Academic curriculum
Positions
(current) Technical Director - Telmo Araújo Innovation Center (CITTA), Campina Grande-PB
(2019-2023) Head of Department - Department of Computing and Systems, UFCG
(2019-2020) President of the Brazilian Computer Society’s Formal Methods Committee
(2015-2021) Vice-director - Embrapii, CEEI-UFCG
(2011-2013) Head of the Computer Science Bachelor Program, UFCG
Research
Human Factors in Software Development
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One of my current focus is exploring the phenomenon of career abandonment of software developers. So far, we have gathered main motivators for leaving the profession, and collected data relating technical motivators to current developers’ intention to abandon the career.
Distinguished paper at CHASE 2025; preprint
Paper at SBES -
I’ve been working on Diversity for Software Development Teams. Camila Sarmento finished her Ph.D., focusing on how women deal with community smells and challenges in the context of agile estimation meetings. Collaboration with Alexander Serebrenik, Gemma Catolino, Damian Tamburri, and Fabio Palomba.
Paper at SBES
Paper at SANER -
In addition, Ph.D. student Rayana Rocha, in collaboration with Prof. Camila Sarmento, is exploring how (the lack of) diversity affect the practice of pair programming.
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Community smells are likely social issues that may come up in software teams. Ph.D. student Carlos Fran has been studying the role of Agile retrospective meetings in addressing those issues.
Paper at CHASE 2025 -
Team leadership styles in Agile teams is currently being researched by Ph.D. student Narallynne Maciel, in collaboration with Prof. Lucas Gren.
Papers at SBES 2023 and 2024 -
Ph.D. student Danielly Gualberto is currently exploring the factors that motivate people with different educational backgrounds to start a career in software engineering.
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An ever-increasing context in software teams - software with machine components; M.Sc. students Sheila Paiva and Regina Letícia are investigating the experience in teams mixing software engineers and machine learning/data science specialists, from the human factors perspective. Collaboration with Prof. Franklin Ramalho.
Software evolution and refactoring
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Flávia Estélia has finished her Ph.D. on investigating whether code reviewers induce actual refactorings in repositories. Collaboration with Prof. Everton Alves and Prof. Tsantalis.
paper at ESE Journal
Paper at ESEM -
In 2024, Marcelo Vitorino finished his M.Sc. dissertation on the relationship with code smells detected by code reviewers. Collaboration with Prof. João Brunet. Currently, as a Ph.D. student, he is investigating how context information added to prompts could affect the results of smell-related code reviews generated by LLMs.
Bug reports
- In collaboration with Prof. Fraklin Ramalho, working on using machine learning can help investigate the relationship between bug reports and the actual bug management process
Paper at the ASE journal
Paper at ICEIS
Paper at SBES
Computer Science and Public Health
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In collaboration with group of medical doctors, I have been exploration the application of LLMs (Large Language Models) for image diagnostics, within the UFCG Medical school and Hospital (HUAC)
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In collaboration with researchers from Brazil, United Kingdom and Turkey, I actively engaged in a multidisciplinary research project Project MEWAR to model mosquito populations for early warning systems and rapid response public by health authorities correlating climate, weather and spatial-temporal mobile surveillance data, helping fight vector-bourne diseases, such as Dengue and Zika.
Paper at Frontiers in Tropical Diseases
Paper at Environmental Science and Pollution Research
Paper at Frontiers in Public Health
Formal software verification
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A Domain-specific Language for Verifying Software Requirement Constraints/ M.Sc. Marzina Vidal; published at Science of Computer Programming.
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In collaboration with Prof. Rohit Gheyi, my former Ph.D. student Alysson Milanez devised a method for generating design-by-contract clauses from textual commentary
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In my Ph.D., I devised and proved properties on a theory that connected Alloy specifications and object-oriented programs, when they co-evolve.
Ph.D. thesis
ETAPs paper
Teaching
Mathematics for Computer Science II
Logic for Computer Science (Portuguese)
Human-Machine Interaction (Portuguese)
Scientific Writing (Portuguese)
Industry Partnerships
Observability of e-commerce sites and apps.
Training and hiring of ~60 undergrad and grad students
Development of a High-scale investigation system, with AI features.
Training of ~80 students
Data science systems for large maintenance data processing.
More than 20 students involved
Network-based systems for medical collaboration using High-Tech Medical Image Devices.
8 students involved
Innovative test process and tools for card reading devices.
12 students involved
Several innovation projects, involving computational vision, IOT technology and assembling-line automation.
40 students involved
Education
Software Engineering, Ph.D. (2008), from UFPE (Brazil)
Computer Science, M.Sc. (2001), from UFPE (Brazil)
Computer Science, B.Sc. (1999), from UFG (Brazil).
Work Experience
UFCG: Associate Professor Computer Science (2009 - now), Campina Grande
UPE: Adjunct Professor Computer Engineering (2006 - 2009), Recife
IBM: Software Developer (2001 - 2002), Sillicon Valley Lab (USA)