Hi, I’m Diego Marcilio.

Since October 2019, I’ve been a Ph.D. student in the Software Institute part of the Faculty of Informatics at the Università della Svizzera italiana (also known as USI), in Lugano, Switzerland. I am currently working under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Carlo A. Furia.

My research interests center around aiding developers when understanding, writing, evolving, and maintaining source code.

I’ve investigated which kind of static analysis tools violations Java developers fix (ICPC 2019) and proposed a technique to automatically fix a subset of useful violations (JSS 2020), which fixes were welcomed by established open-source projects.

More recently, I’m exploring Java Exceptions. I’ve looked into how developers of popular open-source projects write JUnit tests exercising exceptions (MSR 2021) and devised a technique to automatically extract exception preconditions of methods (ICSME 2022). We used some of our extracted preconditions to add and improve the documentation of Apache projects.

From September-December 2022, I was an intern in the Uber Programming Systems Group working from the lively Aarhus, Denmark. I had the pleasure to work closely with Dr. Raj Barik and Dr. Ameya Ketkar on static analysis and refactoring tools. My main contribution was adding GoLang support to Piranha, a tool for cleaning up code related to feature flags.

You can see more of my work in publications. Please reach me at diego.marcilio@usi.ch .

Background

In August 2019, I earned my master degree from the University of Brasília (UnB), in Brazil, under the supervision of Prof. Dr. Rodrigo Bonifácio. During that time, I also had the privilege of working along with Prof. Dr. Gustavo Pinto, Prof. Dr. Edna Canedo, and Prof. Furia.

My master thesis was awarded 1st place (in Portuguese) in the thesis competition at the Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering 2020 (SBES), which considered master theses defended in Brazil during 2019.

Before and during my masters, I worked for more than seven years as a Software Engineer in several companies in Brasília, Brazil. This practical experience deeply motivates my research interests.