Research Publications &  Awards

About Saurabh:

Saurabh Tiwari is an Associate Professor at Dhirubhai Ambani Institute of Information and Communication Technology (DA-IICT), Gandhinagar (India). Previously, he worked as a Postdoc Researcher at Mälardalen University, (Sweden) worked with Volvo Construction Equipments AB in the area of Model-Based System Engineering (MBT, MBD). His current research interests are in the area of Requirements Engineering, Empirical Software Engineering, Mining Software Repositories, Green Computing, and HCI. He is also doing research in Software Engineering Education and Training to identify/devise innovative teaching methodologies to teach Software Engineering concepts. 

He has received a research grant from the Science and Engineering Research Board (SERB, Government of India) under the Early Career Research Award scheme in March 2017 for a research project. He has published several research papers in various international conferences (ESEC/FSE, RE, ICSE, APSEC, ISEC, ICECCS, SAC, etc.) and journals (IST, CS&I, JSEP, CAE, etc). He has also received two best paper awards at the 20th APSEC 2013 and 25th APSEC 2018 conferences respectively, and his PhD thesis is indexed in the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) SIGSOFT (Special Interest Group on Software Engineering) list of PhD Dissertations in the area of Software Engineering (2016). He is a Senior Member of the ACM and IEEE.

PhD Thesis:

Research Area: Software Engineering (Empirical Software Engineering, Analysis modeling, Assessment)

Title: Evaluating Usability Aspects Of Use Cases For Software Specification Problems (indexed in ACM SIGSOFT)

Abstract: Use case models have been significantly discussed and dwelled in the existing literature with their style of delineating the requirements from informal textual descriptions to a more conventional flair. There have been many attempts made to formalize the use cases by restructuring the use case template that makes use of certain grammatical constructions to guide the structure or the style of the description. However, the amount of formalism incorporated in the use case can have substantial influence on the quality of the specification. In this thesis, we report on the empirical studies conducted to assess three usability aspects, namely comprehension, learnability and operability of the use cases for the software specification problems used in the study. We judged the comprehension aspect by evaluating the subjects’ understanding of the requirements, specified in eight different use case templates, and the ease with which the changes were made by them in the requirement specifications. Our results suggested that a more descriptive use case template with an intermediate degree of formality is more understandable, and use case templates which tend to be more formal are more flexible to adapt to the changes. The learnability aspect was judged by assessing the completeness, the correctness, the consistency and the redundancy of the use case specifications developed by the subjects using eight different use case templates for a set of software specification problems. We found that the use case templates with a higher degree of formalism lead to enhance learnability. We evaluated the operability aspect by deriving analysis models from a set of problem specifications specified using two different templates having different degrees of formalism, and it was found that the use case templates with a higher degree of formalism led to the derivation of analysis models of higher quality. Finally, we investigated the specification completeness of the eight use case templates, and identified twenty use case elements which significantly contributed towards the completeness of the problem specifications used in the study.

Keywords: use case specification, usability aspects, comprehension, learnability, operability, analysis modeling, completeness, experimental evaluation

Publications:

Selected Refereed International Journal Articles—

1. Swapnil Thakar, Saurabh Tiwari, and Santosh Singh Rathore, "A Human Values Perspective on Playability Issues of Mobile Games", International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, September 2025, https://doi.org/10.1080/10447318.2025.2554300 [Accepted, September 2025]

2. Prutha Patani, Saurabh Tiwari, and Santosh Singh Rathore, "The Impact of GitHub on Students’ Learning and Engagement in Software Engineering Course", Computer Applications in Engineering Education, Volume 32, Issue 5, Pages 1-23, September 2024, e22775, https://doi.org/10.1002/cae.22775

3. Lavneet Singh, Saurabh Tiwari, and Sanjay Srivastava, "A Study on Creating Energy Efficient Cloud-Connected User Applications using the RMVRVM Paradigm",  The Journal of Systems & Software, Volume 213, Article 112033, Pages 1-17, July 2024. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2024.112033

4. Saurabh Tiwari and Santosh Singh Rathore, "Understanding General Concepts of Requirements Engineering through Design Thinking: An Experimental Study with Students", Computer Applications in Engineering Education , Volume 30, Issue 6, November 2022, Pages 1683-1700, https://doi.org/10.1002/cae.22550

5. Saurabh Tiwari and Atul Gupta, "Use Case Specifications: How Complete are they?", Journal of Software: Evolution and Process, Volume 32, January 2020, Pages 1-23, https://doi.org/10.1002/smr.2218

6. José L. Barros-Justo, Fabiane B.V. Benitti, Saurabh Tiwari, "The impact of Use Cases in real-world software development projects: A systematic mapping study", Computer Standards & Interfaces, Volume 66, October 2019, 103362, Pages 1-16, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.csi.2019.103362 [Preprint Version]

7. Saurabh Tiwari and Atul Gupta, "Investigating comprehension and learnability aspects of use cases for software specification problems", Information and Software Technology, Volume 91, November 2017, Pages 22-43, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.infsof.2017.06.003

8. Saurabh Tiwari and Atul Gupta, "A Systematic Literature Review of Use Case Specifications Research", Information and Software Technology, Volume 67, November 2015, Pages 128-158, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.infsof.2015.06.004.

Selected Refereed International Conference Papers—

1. Saurabh Tiwari and Santosh Singh Rathore, Leveraging LLMs for Requirements Engineering Education: How to Approach?, In 33rd IEEE International Requirements Engineering conference (RE 2025), RE@Next, Valencia, Spain, September 1-5, 2025, pp. 458-466, doi: 10.1109/RE63999.2025.00055.

2. Lavneet Singh and Saurabh Tiwari. Adoption of RMVRVM Paradigm in Industrial Setting: An Empirical Study, In Proceedings of the 18th Innovations in Software Engineering Conference (ISEC 2025), ACM, Research Track, NIT Kurukshetra, February 20-22, 2025, Article 10, 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1145/3717383.3717390.

3. Shivani Balwani, Saurabh Tiwari, Sourish Dasgupta, and Akhilesh Sharma, An Approach for Providing Recommendation for Requirements Non-Conformant with Requirement Templates (RTs), In 17th Innovations in Software Engineering Conference (ISEC 2024), ACM, Research Track, IIIT Bangalore, February 22-24, 2024, Article 9, 1–11. https://doi.org/10.1145/3641399.3641412.

4. Shivani Balwani, Saurabh Tiwari, Sourish Dasgupta, and Akhilesh Sharma, AutoReco: A Tool for Recommending Requirements for their Non-Conformance with Requirement Templates (RTs), In 31st IEEE International Requirements Engineering 2023 conference (RE 2023), Tool Demonstration Track, Leibniz Universität Hannover, Germany, September 4-8, 2023.

5. Nidhi Pandya and Saurabh Tiwari. Similarities in Challenges faced by Developers: Investigations on Stack Overflow and GitHub. In 16th Innovations in Software Engineering Conference (ISEC 2023), ACM, New York, NY, USA, Article 15, 1–11, 23-25 February 2023, Research Track, IIIT Allahabad, https://doi.org/10.1145/3578527.3578539.

6. Kushagra Pathak, Parita Patel, Mital Kamani and Saurabh Tiwari. Inclusivity Checker: A Testing Tool to Detect Inclusivity Bugs in Websites. In 16th Innovations in Software Engineering Conference (ISEC 2023), New York, NY, USA, Article 23, 1–5, 23-25 February 2023, Research Track, IIIT Allahabad, https://doi.org/10.1145/3578527.3578547.

7. Saurabh Tiwari, Kumar Iyer and ‪Eduard Paul Enoiu, Combining Model-Based Testing and Automated Analysis of Behavioural Models using GraphWalker and UPPAAL, In 29th Asia Pacific Software Engineering Conference (APSEC 2022), pp. 452-456, ERA Track, Japan, 2022, doi: 10.1109/APSEC57359.2022.00061.

8. Prahar Pandya and Saurabh Tiwari, CORMS: A GitHub and Gerrit based Hybrid Code Reviewer Recommendation Approach for Modern Code Review, In 30th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE 2022), pp 546–557, Research Paper/Technical Track, NUS, Singapore,  14 - 18 November 2022. [Presentation][Video]

9. Saurabh Tiwari, Parv Shah, and Manish Khare, NL2RT: A Tool to Translate Natural Language Text into Requirements Templates (RTs), In 30th IEEE International Requirements Engineering 2022 Conference (RE 2022), pp 262-263, Tool Demo Track, Melbourne, Australia, 15 - 19 August 2022.

10. Saurabh Tiwari, Santosh Singh Rathore, Sheikh Umar Farooq, and Prutha Patani. How Students Are Using GitHub? A Survey. In 15th Innovations in Software Engineering Conference (ISEC 2022), 24-26 February, Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), Article 26, pages 1–5, 2022.

11. Aman Kumar, Manish Khare, Saurabh Tiwari, Sentiment Analysis of Developers’ Comments on GitHub Repository: A Study. In 14th International Conference on Advanced Computational Intelligence (ICACI), 2022, pp. 91-98, doi: 10.1109/ICACI55529.2022.9837754, IEEE Xplore, China, 2022.

12. Deepti Ameta and Saurabh Tiwari, Why does the experiment fail with students? An Experience,  In 14th Innovations in Software Engineering Conference (ISEC 2021), 25-27 February, ACM, Article 15, pages 1–5, 2021.

13. Saurabh Tiwari, Santosh Singh Rathore, Shreya Sagar, and Yash Mirani, Identifying Use Case Elements from Textual Specification: A Preliminary Study, In 28th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference (RE 2020), pp 410-411, Zurich, Switzerland, August 31-September 4, 2020.

14. Saurabh Tiwari, Sheikh Umar Farooq, Ranjith Tharayil, and Paramvir Singh, An Experience Report on Second Workshop on Emerging Software Engineering Education, ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes, Volume 45, Issue 3, pages 28-35, July 2020.

15. Saurabh Tiwari, Rishab Arora, and Ashray Bharambe, UC2Map: Automatic Translation of Use Case Maps from Specification, In 35th ACM-SIGAPP Symposium on Applied Computing, SAC 2020, pp 1650-1653, Brno, the Czech Republic, March 30-April 3, 2020

16. Saurabh Tiwari, Impact of CBL on Student's Learning and Performance: An Experience Report, In 13th Innovations in Software Engineering Conference, ISEC 2020, 27-29 February, ACM, Article No. 15, 2020 [Preprint Version]

17. Deepti Ameta, Saurabh Tiwari, Paramvir Singh, A Preliminary Study on Case-Based Learning Teaching Pedagogy: Scope in SE Education, In 13th Innovations in Software Engineering Conference, ISEC 2020, 27-29 February, ACM, Article No. 11, 2020 [Preprint Version]

18. Saurabh Tiwari and Santosh Singh Rathore, Teaching Software Process Models to Software Engineering Students: An Exploratory Study, In 26th Asia Pacific Software Engineering Conference, APSEC 2019, pp. 308-315, IEEE CPS, 2-5 December, Putrajaya, Malaysia, 2019.

19. Saurabh Tiwari, Deepti Ameta, and Asim Banerjee, An Approach to Identify Use Case Scenarios from Textual Requirements Specification, In 12th Innovations in Software Engineering Conference (ISEC 2019), 14-16 February, ACM, Article No. 5, 2019. 

20. Chirag Usdadiya, Saurabh Tiwari, and Asim Banerjee, An Empirical Study on Assessing the Quality of Use Case Metrics, In 12th Innovations in Software Engineering Conference (ISEC 2019), 14-16 February, ACM, Article No. 6, 2019.

21. Jagadish Suryadevara, and Saurabh Tiwari, Adopting MBSE in Construction Equipment Industry: An Experience Report, In 25th Asia-Pacific Software Engineering Conference, ASPEC 2018, pages 512-521, IEEE CPS, Nara, Japan, December 4-7, 2018 (Software Engineering in Practice track) [Best Paper Award][Preprint Version].

22. Saurabh Tiwari, Emina Smajlovic, Amina Krekic, and Jagadish Suryadevara, A System Modeling Approach to Enhance Functional and Software Development, In 2018 Software Technologies: Applications and Foundations Workshop (MDE@DeRun 2018). STAF 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 11176. Springer, Cham, pp 512-518,  Toulouse, France, June 28, 2018 [Preprint Version]

23. Aliya Hussain, Saurabh Tiwari, Jagadish Suryadevara, and Eduard Enoiu, From Modeling to Test Case Generation in Industrial Embedded System Domain, In 2018 Software Technologies: Applications and Foundations Workshop (MDE@DeRun 2018). STAF 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 11176. Springer, Cham, pp 499-505,  Toulouse, France, June 28, 2018 [Preprint Version]

24. Saurabh Tiwari, Deepti Ameta, Paramvir Singh and Ashish Sureka, Teaching Requirements Engineering Concepts using Case-Based Learning, In 2018 Second International Workshop on Software Engineering Education for Millennials (SEEM 2018) co-located to IEEE/ACM 40th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2018), pp 8-15, Gothenburg, Sweden, June 2018 [Preprint Version].

25. Paramvir Singh, Sheikh Umar Farooq, Saurabh Tiwari, and Ashish Sureka, An Experience Report on Workshop on Emerging Software Engineering Education, ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Notes, Volume 43, Issue 2, pages 12-23, May 2018, DOI - https://doi.org/10.1145/3203094.3203112

26. Saurabh Tiwari and Santosh Singh Rathore, "Coupling and Cohesion Metrics for Object-Oriented Software: A Systematic Mapping Study". In 11th Innovations in Software Engineering Conference (ISEC'18), ACM, Article No. 8, IIIT Hyderabad, 2018.

27. Saurabh Tiwari, Veena Saini, Paramvir Singh, and Ashish Sureka, "A Case Study on the Application of Case-Based Learning in Software Testing". In 11th Innovations in Software Engineering Conference (ISEC'18), ACM, Article No. 11, IIIT Hyderabad, 2018.

28. Saurabh Tiwari and Mayank Laddha, "UCAnalyzer: A Tool to Analyze Use Case Textual Descriptions". In 25th IEEE International Requirements Engineering Conference, IEEE Computer Society, RE2017, pp 448-449, Lisbon, Portugal, 2017.

29. Saurabh Tiwari and Atul Gupta, "An Approach of Generating Test Requirements for Agile Software Development". In 8th Indian Software Engineering Conference, ACM SIGSOFT, ISEC2015, pp 186-195, Bangalore, 2015.

30. Saurabh Tiwari and Atul Gupta, "Does Increasing Formalism in the Use Case Templates Help?". In 7th Indian Software Engineering Conference, ACM SIGSOFT, ISEC2014, Article No. 6, IIT Madras, 2014.

31. Saurabh Tiwari and Atul Gupta, "A Controlled Experiment to Assess the Effectiveness of Eight Use Case Templates". In 20th Asia Pacific Software Engineering Conference, IEEE Computer Society, APSEC 2013, pp 207-214, Bangkok, 2013.

32. Saurabh Tiwari and Atul Gupta, "An Approach to Generate Safety Validation Test Cases from UML Activity Diagram". In 20th Asia Pacific Software Engineering Conference, IEEE Computer Society, APSEC 2013, pp 189-198, Bangkok, 2013. [Best Paper Award]

33. Saurabh Tiwari, Santosh Singh Rathore, Sudhanshu Gupta, Vaibhav Gogate and Atul Gupta, "Analysis of Use Case Requirements using SFTA and SFMEA Techniques". In IEEE-ICECCS 2012, pp 29 -38, IEEE 17th International Conference on Engineering of Complex Computer Systems, Paris, France, 2012.

34. Saurabh Tiwari, Santosh Singh Rathore, Abhinav Singh, Abhijeet Singh and Atul Gupta, "An Approach to Generate Actor-Oriented Activity Charts from Use Case Requirements". In 19th Asia Pacific Software Engineering Conference, IEEE Computer Society, APSEC 2012, pp 270-275, Hong Kong, 2012.

35. Saurabh Tiwari, Santosh Singh Rathore and Atul Gupta, "Selecting Requirement Elicitation Techniques for Software Projects". In CSI 6th International Conference on Software Engineering, CONSEG 2012, IEEE Xplore, pp 1-10, Indore, India, 2012. 

36. Saurabh Tiwari and Atul Gupta, "Statechart-based Use Case Requirement Validation of Event-Driven System". In 27th Annual ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, ACM-SIGAPP (SAC 2012), pp 1091-1093, Riva Del Garda, Italy, 2012.

Editor (Proceedings/Books)

1. Sonali Agarwal, Abhik Roychoudhury, Rahul Purandare, Saurabh Tiwari, Lov Kumar: 16th Innovations in Software Engineering Conference, ISEC2023, Allahabad, India, February 23-25, 2023. ACM 2023, ISBN 979-8-4007-0064-4 [As a Publication Chair of ISEC 2023 Conference]

2. Saurabh Tiwari, Sanjay Chaudhary, Chanchal K. Roy, Meenakshi D'Souza, Richa Sharma, Lov Kumar: ISEC 2022: 15th Innovations in Software Engineering Conference, Gandhinagar, India, February 24 - 26, 2022. ACM 2022, ISBN 978-1-4503-9618-9 [As a General Chair of ISEC 2022 Conference]

3. Bimlesh Wadhwa, Shailey Chawla, Benjamin Gan, Eng Lieh Ouh, Pornsiri Muenchaisri, Saurabh Tiwari, Santosh Singh Rathore: Joint Proceedings of SEED & NLPaSE co-located with 27th Asia Pacific Software Engineering Conference 2020, Singapore, December 1, 2020. CEUR Workshop Proceedings 2799, CEUR-WS.org 2021 [As a Workshop Organiser, NLPaSE 2020]

IEEE Blogs/Magazine, Workshop Organisation reports & Online Repositories Papers —

1. Santosh Singh Rathore, Saurabh Tiwari, and Sheikh Umar Farooq. 2025. Seventh Workshop on Emerging Software Engineering Education (WESEE 2025). In Proceedings of the 18th Innovations in Software Engineering Conference (ISEC '25). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 22, 1–3. https://doi.org/10.1145/3717383.3721236

2. Santosh Singh Rathore, Saurabh Tiwari, and Sheikh Umar Farooq. 2024. Workshop Report on Emerging Software Engineering Education. In Proceedings of the 17th Innovations in Software Engineering Conference (ISEC '24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 20, 1–2. https://doi.org/10.1145/3641399.3641436

3. Saurabh Tiwari, Sheikh Umar Farooq, and Santosh Singh Rathore. 2023. A Report on the Fifth Workshop on Emerging Software Engineering Education (WESEE 2023). In 16th Innovations in Software Engineering Conference (ISEC2023). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 28, 1–2. https://doi.org/10.1145/3578527.3581749.

4. Saurabh Tiwari, Sheikh Umar Farooq, and Santosh Singh Rathore, A Report on the Fourth Workshop on Emerging Software Engineering Education (WESEE 2021), WESEE'21. In 14th Innovations in Software Engineering Conference (ISEC 2021), ACM, Article No. 26, Feb 24, 2021, India.

5. Shreyansh Surana, Smit Detroja, and Saurabh Tiwari, A Tool to Extract Structured Data from GitHub. arXiv:2012.03453v1 (2020)

6. Saurabh Tiwari, Sheikh Umar Farooq, Paramvir Singh, and Santosh Singh Rathore, A Report on the Third Workshop on Emerging Software Engineering Education (WESEE 2020), WESEE'20. In 13th Innovations in Software Engineering Conference (ISEC 2020), ACM, Article No. 20, Feb 27, 2020, India.

7. Saurabh Tiwari and Jitendra Singh Thakur, A Report on Students Software Project Contest co-located with ISEC 2020, In 13th Innovations in Software Engineering Conference (ISEC 2020), ACM, Article No. 25, Feb 29, 2020, India.

8. Paramvir Singh, Sheikh Umar Farooq, Saurabh Tiwari, and Ranjith Tharayil, A Report on the Second Workshop on Emerging Software Engineering Education (WESEE 2019), WESEE'19. In 12th Innovations in Software Engineering Conference (ISEC 2019), ACM, Article No. 32, Feb 14, 2019, India.

9. Saurabh Tiwari, Teaching SE Concepts by Engaging Millennials in Discussion of Real-World Scenarios, Blog on Software Engineering Education, SE-EDU, June 2018.

10. Saurabh Tiwari, Adopting a Modelling Environment at Volvo to Enhance Systems Engineering, Testing, and Function Development Process, MegaMart2 Project (funded from the Electronic Component Systems for European Leadership Joint Undertaking under grant agreement No. 737494 and The Swedish Innovation Agency, Vinnova), May 2018.

11. Veena Saini, Deepti Ameta, Paramvir Singh, Ashish Sureka, and Saurabh Tiwari, SEABED: An Open-Source Repository of Software Engineering Case Studies, IEEE Software Blog, January 2018

12. Paramvir Singh, Sheikh Umar Farooq, and Saurabh Tiwari, A Report on the Workshop on Emerging Software Engineering Education(WESEE 2018), WESEE'18. In 11th Innovations in Software Engineering Conference (ISEC 2018), ACM, Article No. 20, Feb 9, 2018, at IIIT Hyderabad, India.

13. Saurabh Tiwari and Santosh Singh Rathore, A Methodology for the Selection of Requirement Elicitation Technique. CoRR abs/1709.08481 (2017).

Unpublished Reports or Papers—

• Saurabh Tiwari and Atul Gupta, Software Fault Tree Analysis: A Safety Validation Tool for Event-Driven Systems, IEEE Software Journal, SWSI: Safety-Critical Software Systems.

• Saurabh Tiwari, A Quest on Assessing the Usability of Unit Testing Tools from Novice Perspective, To appear in first International Conference on Software Engineering and Data Sciences (CoSEDS 2018), University of Kashmir, Srinagar, India, June 20-21, 2018.

Awards:

• Awarded Travel Grant support by SERB International Travel Support (ITS) Scheme to attend and present research work in the ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE 2022) at NUS Singapore, 14-18 November, 2022.

• Awarded Full Travel Grant support by SERB International Travel Support (ITS) Scheme to attend and present research work in the ACM SAC (35th Symposium On Applied Computing) 2020 Conference at Brno, Czech Republic, March 30-April 3, 2020 (not availed due to CoVID-19)

• Best Paper Award (SEIP Track) in 25th Asia Pacific Software Engineering Conference (APSEC 2018) for the research paper entitled “Adopting MBSE in Construction Equipment Industry: An Experience Report”.

• Early Career Research Award (Individual centric) from the Science and Engineering Board (SERB), Department of Science and Technology (DST), Government of India for a two year R&D project.

• Best Paper Award in 20th Asia Pacific Software Engineering Conference (APSEC 2013) for the research paper entitled “An Approach to Generate Safety Validation Test Cases from UML Activity Diagram”

• Awarded by CSI-SIGSE Student Travel Grant, CSIR Travel Grant,  MPCST Travel Grant to attend IEEE-APSEC (20th Asia Pacific Software Engineering Conference) 2013 at Bangkok, Thailand, Dec 2-5, 2013.

• Awarded by SIGAPP Student Travel Award to attend ACM SIGAPP - SAC (27th Symposium On Applied Computing) 2012 Conference at Riva del Garda (Trento), Italy, March 26-30, 2012.

• Awarded by Student Travel and Registration Grant to attend ACM SIGSOFT - ISEC (5th India Software Engineering Conference) 2012 at Indian Institute of Technology, Kanpur, Feb 22-25, 2012.

• Awarded by Student Travel and Registration Grant to attend ACM SIGSOFT - ISEC (6th India Software Engineering Conference) 2013 at New Delhi, India, Feb 21-23, 2013.