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Mining software repositories is an effective way of gaining insights on how software is built. These insights can be used to better understand how languages, tools, and methods are used, in practice.

The goal of this dissertation is to mine a software repository of over 93000 UML models, taken from over 24000 projects, to learn about how each UML sub-language is used, in practice, and identify common idioms, as well as frequent modelling mistakes. These insights can be used to improve the way developers learn and use UML.

There is a large gender gap in the software industry, and research has shown that different problem-solving skills tend to cluster by gender. This problematic for the software industry, as it leads to less diversity in the problem-solving skills of its members, and for society at large, as women are much less likely to consider pursuing a career in software development than men.

The goal of this dissertation is ultimately to promote a more gender-inclusive software industry and raise awareness of the benefits of diverse teams. To achieve this, we will evaluate:

1. how the different problem-solving styles, often clustered by gender, correlate to the roles practitioners play in software development;

2. the extent to which gender-related biases reported in distributed software development environments where people do not know each other, namely in open source contexts, is also an issue in collaborative face-to-face environments;

3. if, and how, inclusiveness is addressed by software managers, i.e., how do software managers promote diversity in their software development teams

We will use Straussian Grounded Theory and collect data by a mixed-method approach that combines questionnaires and semi-structured interviews with practitioners, in order to understand how software companies deal with inclusiveness in the composition of software development teams.

COVID-19 has placed new challenges to the software industry. Although remote collaboration was already common in many organizations, particularly those dedicated to global software development, the pandemic may have fundamentally changed the industry profile, particularly concerning communication patterns within the development team. Recent studies show how the pandemic had a negative effect on developers’ well-being and productivity, with women, parents, and people suffering from some disability being disproportionately affected. The goal of this dissertation is to:

1. characterize how software companies are coping with this challenge, which opportunities they detected, and which best practices they found to leverage remote collaboration and effective communication, as well as to mitigate collaborators’ productivity challenges.

2. characterize the potential benefits from the working from home and hybrid models that have been adopted, in contrast to the more traditional co-located development teams (e.g. in open spaces).

3. characterize how companies foresee changes in their software development practices after the pandemic.

We will use Straussian Grounded Theory and collect data by a mixed-method approach that combines questionnaires and semi-structured interviews with practitioners, in order to understand how software companies deal with the challenges brought by COVID-19.