Publications

Below, you’ll find my publication list including preprints and presentation slides.
My ORCID is 0000-0002-2442-7522.
You may also consult my Scholar and DBLP profiles as well as my research statement.

2025

Not Real or Too Soft? On the Challenges of Publishing Interdisciplinary Software Engineering Research.

Sonja M. Hyrynsalmi, Grischa Liebel, Ronnie de Souza Santos, Sebastian Baltes
Proceedings of the 47th International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Society (ICSE SEIS 2025).

Towards Evaluation Guidelines for Empirical Studies involving LLMs.

Stefan Wagner, Marvin Muñoz Barón, Davide Falessi, and Sebastian Baltes
2nd International Workshop on Methodological Issues with Empirical Studies in Software Engineering (WSESE 2025).
Acceptance rate: 68% (13/19).
Website

2024

Do Test and Environmental Complexity Increase Flakiness? An Empirical Study of SAP HANA.

Alexander Berndt, Thomas Bach, and Sebastian Baltes
Proceedings of the 18th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM IGC 2024).
Best Paper Award.
Preprint • arXiv • Open Access • BibTeX

Taming Timeout Flakiness: An Empirical Study of SAP HANA.

Alexander Berndt, Sebastian Baltes, and Thomas Bach.
Proceedings of the 46th International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Practice (ICSE SEIP 2024).
Acceptance rate: 38% (45/120).
Preprint • arXiv • Slides • BibTeX

UX Debt: Developers Borrow While Users Pay.

Sebastian Baltes and Veronika Dashuber.
Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering (CHASE 2024).
Acceptance rate: 35% (7/20).
Preprint • arXiv • Slides • BibTeX

Making Software Development More Diverse and Inclusive: Key Themes, Challenges, and Future Directions.

Sonja M. Hyrynsalmi, Sebastian Baltes, Chris Brown, Rafael Prikladnicki, Gema Rodriguez-Perez, Alexander Serebrenik, Jocelyn Simmonds, Bianca Trinkenreich, Yi Wang, Grischa Liebel.
ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM).

Bridging Gaps, Building Futures: Advancing Software Developer Diversity and Inclusion Through Future-Oriented Research.

Sonja M. Hyrynsalmi, Sebastian Baltes, Chris Brown, Rafael Prikladnicki, Gema Rodriguez-Perez, Alexander Serebrenik, Jocelyn Simmonds, Bianca Trinkenreich, Yi Wang, Grischa Liebel.
2030 Roadmap for Software Engineering Workshop.
Preprint • arXiv

Teaching Literature Reviewing for Software Engineering Research.

Sebastian Baltes and Paul Ralph
Book Chapter in Handbook on Teaching Empirical Software Engineering, Springer.
Preprint • arXiv

Generative AI in Software Engineering Must Be Human-Centered: The Copenhagen Manifesto.

Daniel Russo, Sebastian Baltes, Niels van Berkel, Paris Avgeriou, Fabio Calefato, Beatriz Cabrero-Daniel, Gemma Catolino, Jürgen Cito, Neil Ernst, Thomas Fritz, Hideaki Hata, Reid Holmes, Maliheh Izadi, Foutse Khomh, Mikkel Baun Kjærgaard, Grischa Liebel, Alberto Lluch Lafuente, Stefano Lambiase, Walid Maalej, Gail Murphy, Bogdan Vasilescu.
Journal of Systems and Software.
Preprint • Zenodo • BibTeX

2023

Visually Analyzing Company-wide Software Service Dependencies: An Industrial Case Study.

Sebastian Baltes, Brian Pfitzmann, Thomas Kowark, Christoph Treude, and Fabian Beck.
11th IEEE Working Conference on Software Visualization (VISSOFT 2023).
Preprint • arXiv • BibTeX

A Penny a Function: Towards Cost Transparent Cloud Programming.

Lukas Böhme, Tom Beckmann, Sebastian Baltes, Robert Hirschfeld.
2nd ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Programming Abstractions and Interactive Notations, Tools, and Environments (PAINT 2023).
Preprint • arXiv • BibTeX

“STILL AROUND”: Experiences and Survival Strategies of Veteran Women Software Developers.

Sterre van Breukelen, Ann Barcomb, Sebastian Baltes, and Alexander Serebrenik.
Proceedings of the 45th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2023).
Acceptance rate: 26% (209/796).
ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award.
Preprint • arXiv • Slides • Poster • BibTeX

Applying Information Theory to Software Evolution.

Adriano Torres, Sebastian Baltes, Christoph Treude, and Markus Wagner.
Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Natural-Language-based Software Engineering (NLBSE 2023).
Preprint • arXiv • BibTeX

18 Million Links in Commit Messages: Purpose, Evolution, and Decay.

Tao Xiao, Sebastian Baltes, Hideaki Hata, Christoph Treude, Raula Gaikovina Kula, Takashi Ishio, and Kenichi Matsumoto.
Empirical Software Engineering 2023, Volume 28, Article 91, 2023.
Preprint • arXiv • BibTeX

From Full-fledged ERP Systems Towards Process-centric Business Process Platforms.

Lukas Böhme, Tobias Wuttke, Ralf Teusner, Michael Perscheid, Sebastian Baltes, Christoph Matthies, and Benedict Bender.
29th Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS 2023).
AMCIS 2023 Top 25% Paper.
Preprint • arXiv • BibTeX

2022

Paving the Way for Mature Secondary Research: The Seven Types of Literature Review.

Paul Ralph and Sebastian Baltes.
Proceedings of the 30th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE 2022).
Acceptance rate: 25% (7/28).
Preprint • arXiv • BibTeX

Sampling in Software Engineering Research: A Critical Review and Guidelines.

Sebastian Baltes and Paul Ralph.
Empirical Software Engineering, Volume 27, Article 94, 2022.
Preprint • arXiv • BibTeX
Lecture (Alexander Serebrenik)

Challenges for Inclusion in Software Engineering: The Case of the Emerging Papua New Guinean Society.

Raula Gaikovina Kula, Christoph Treude, Hideaki Hata, Sebastian Baltes, Igor Steinmacher, Marco Aurelio Gerosa, and Winifred Kula Amini.
IEEE Software (Volume 39, Issue 3, May-June 2022).
Preprint • arXiv • Slides • BibTeX

GitHub Discussions: An Exploratory Study of Early Adoption.

Hideaki Hata, Nicole Novielli, Sebastian Baltes, Raula Gaikovina Kula, and Christoph Treude.
Empirical Software Engineering, Volume 27, Article 3, 2022.
ICSE 2022 Journal First.
Preprint • arXiv • Open Access • BibTeX
Blog Post

2021

Automated Query Reformulation for Efficient Search Based on Query Logs from Stack Overflow.

Kaibo Cao, Chunyang Chen, Sebastian Baltes, Christoph Treude, and Xiang Chen.
Proceedings of the 43rd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2021).
Acceptance rate: 23% (138/602).
ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award.
Preprint • arXiv • BibTeX

Characterizing Search Activities on Stack Overflow.

Jiakun Liu, Sebastian Baltes, Christoph Treude, David Lo, Yun Zhang, and Xin Xia.
Proceedings of the 29th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE 2021).
Acceptance rate: 24% (97/396).
Preprint • BibTeX

On the Diversity and Frequency of Code Related to Mathematical Formulas in Real-World Java Projects.

Oliver Moseler, Felix Lemmer, Sebastian Baltes, and Stephan Diehl.
Journal of Systems & Software, Volume 172, February 2021.
Preprint • arXiv • BibTeX

2020

Is 40 the new 60? How popular media portrays the employability of older software developers.

Sebastian Baltes, George Park, and Alexander Serebrenik.
IEEE Software, Volume 37, Issue 6, November-December 2020.
Preprint • arXiv • BibTeX

Pandemic Programming: How COVID-19 affects software developers and how their organizations can help.

Paul Ralph, Sebastian Baltes, Gianisa Adisaputri, Richard Torkar, Vladimir Kovalenko, Marcos Kalinowski, Nicole Novielli, Shin Yoo, Xavier Devroey, Xin Tan, Minghui Zhou, Burak Turhan, Rashina Hoda, Hideaki Hata, Gregorio Robles, Amin Milani Fard, and Rana Alkadhi.
Empirical Software Engineering, Volume 25, 4927–4961, 2020.
ICSE 2021 Journal First.
Preprint • arXiv • Open Access • BibTeX

Contextual Documentation Referencing on Stack Overflow.

Sebastian Baltes, Christoph Treude, and Martin Robillard.
IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE).
ESEC/FSE 2020 Journal First.
Preprint • arXiv • Slides • BibTeX
Video (Teaser) • Slides (Teaser)

Code Duplication on Stack Overflow.

Sebastian Baltes and Christoph Treude.
Proceedings of the 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE-NIER 2020).
Acceptance rate: 30% (28/93).
Preprint • arXiv • Slides • Video • BibTeX

An Annotated Dataset of Stack Overflow Post Edits.

Sebastian Baltes and Markus Wagner.
Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference Companion Proceedings (GECCO 2020 Companion), 9th Genetic Improvement Workshop.
Preprint • arXiv • Slides • Video • BibTeX

ACM SIGSOFT Empirical Standards

Paul Ralph, Sebastian Baltes, Domenico Bianculli, Yvonne Dittrich, Michael Felderer, Robert Feldt, Antonio Filieri, Carlo Alberto Furia, Daniel Graziotin, Pinjia He, Rashina Hoda, Natalia Juristo, Barbara Kitchenham, Romain Robbes, Daniel Mendez, Jefferson Molleri, Diomidis Spinellis, Miroslaw Staron, Klaas Stol, Damian Tamburri, Marco Torchiano, Christoph Treude, Burak Turhan, and Sira Vegas.
arXiv

Software Developers’ Work Habits and Expertise: Empirical Studies on Sketching, Code Plagiarism, and Expertise Development.

Sebastian Baltes
Ernst Denert Award for Software Engineering 2019, edited by Michael Felderer, Wilhelm Hasselbring, Heiko Koziolek, Florian Matthes, Lutz Prechelt, Ralf Reussner, Bernhard Rumpe, and Ina Schaefer.
Preprint • Open Access • BibTeX

2019

Software Developers’ Work Habits and Expertise: Empirical Studies on Sketching, Code Plagiarism, and Expertise Development.

Sebastian Baltes
Doctoral Dissertation (University of Trier, Germany).
Preprint • Publication • Slides • BibTeX

Usage and Attribution of Stack Overflow Code Snippets in GitHub Projects.

Sebastian Baltes and Stephan Diehl.
Empirical Software Engineering, Volume 24, 1259–1295, 2019.
ICSE 2019 Journal First.
Preprint • arXiv • Slides • BibTeX

SOTorrent: Studying the Origin, Evolution, and Usage of Stack Overflow Code Snippets.

Sebastian Baltes, Christoph Treude, and Stephan Diehl.
Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR 2019).
Acceptance rate: 33% (1/3).
Selected as MSR Mining Challenge 2019.
Preprint • arXiv • Slides • BibTeX

Towards a Theory of Software Development Expertise.

Sebastian Baltes and Stephan Diehl.
LNI 292, Software Engineering and Management 2019 (SE 2019).
Preprint • Slides • BibTeX

2018

Towards a Theory of Software Development Expertise.

Sebastian Baltes and Stephan Diehl.
Proceedings of the 26th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE 2018).
Acceptance rate: 21% (61/289).
Preprint • arXiv • Slides • BibTeX

SOTorrent: Reconstructing and Analyzing the Evolution of Stack Overflow Posts.

Sebastian Baltes, Lorik Dumani, Christoph Treude, and Stephan Diehl.
Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR 2018).
Acceptance rate: 33% (37/113).
Invited to an EMSE journal special issue.
Preprint • arXiv • Slides • BibTeX

Constructing Urban Tourism Space Digitally: A Study of Airbnb Listings in Two Berlin Neighborhoods.

Natalie Stors and Sebastian Baltes.
Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, Vol. 2, Issue CSCW, Article 166 (PACMHCI/CSCW 2018).
Acceptance rate: 26% (185/722).
Preprint • arXiv • BibTeX

(No) Influence of Continuous Integration on the Commit Activity in GitHub Projects.

Sebastian Baltes, Jascha Knack, Daniel Anastasiou, Ralf Tymann, and Stephan Diehl.
Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Software Analytics (SWAN 2018).
Acceptance rate: 64% (7/11).
Best paper award.
Preprint • arXiv • Slides • BibTeX

2017

Round-Trip Sketches: Supporting the Lifecycle of Software Development Sketches from Analog to Digital and Back.

Sebastian Baltes, Fabrice Hollerich, and Stephan Diehl.
2017 IEEE Working Conference on Software Visualization (VISSOFT 2017).
Acceptance rate: 59% (10/17).
Preprint • arXiv • Slides • Poster • BibTeX

Attribution Required: Stack Overflow Code Snippets in GitHub Projects.

Sebastian Baltes, Richard Kiefer, and Stephan Diehl.
Proceedings of the 39th International Conference on Software Engineering Companion (ICSE 2017).
Preprint • arXiv • Poster • BibTeX

2016

Worse Than Spam: Issues In Sampling Software Developers.

Sebastian Baltes and Stephan Diehl.
Proceedings of the 10th International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM 2016).
Acceptance rate: 37% (23/61).
Preprint • arXiv • Slides • BibTeX

Visual Analysis and Coding of Data-Rich User Behavior.

Tanja Blascheck, Fabian Beck, Sebastian Baltes, Thomas Ertl, and Daniel Weiskopf.
Proceedings of the IEEE Conference on Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST 2016).
Acceptance rate: 32% (50/157).
Preprint • BibTeX

Effects of Sketching on Program Comprehension (Research Plan).

Sebastian Baltes and Stefan Wagner.
Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Agile Processes in Software Engineering and Extreme Programming (XP 2016).
Acceptance rate: 38% (5/13).
Preprint • arXiv • BibTeX

2015

Navigate, Understand, Communicate: How Developers Locate Performance Bugs.

Sebastian Baltes, Oliver Moseler, Fabian Beck, and Stephan Diehl.
Proceedings of the 9th International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM 2015).
Acceptance rate: 25% (20/81).
Preprint • arXiv • Slides • BibTeX

VisualCues: Visually Explaining Source Code in Computer Science Education.

Benjamin Biegel, Sebastian Baltes, Bob Prevos, and Stephan Diehl.
Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC 2015).
Acceptance rate: 48% (36/75).
Preprint • Slides • BibTeX

CodeBasket: Making Developers’ Mental Model Visible and Explorable.

Benjamin Biegel, Sebastian Baltes, Ivan Scarpellini, and Stephan Diehl.
Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Context for Software Development (CSD 2015).
Preprint • BibTeX

Sketches and Diagrams in Practice.

Sebastian Baltes and Stephan Diehl.
LNI 239, GI Software Engineering & Management 2015 (SE 2015).
Preprint • Slides • BibTeX

2014

Sketches and Diagrams in Practice.

Sebastian Baltes and Stephan Diehl.
Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE 2014).
Acceptance rate: 22% (61/273).
Preprint • arXiv • Slides • Poster • BibTeX

Linking Sketches and Diagrams to Source Code Artifacts.

Sebastian Baltes, Peter Schmitz, and Stephan Diehl.
Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE 2014 Research Demos).
Acceptance rate: 65% (15/23).
Preprint • arXiv • Poster • Video • BibTeX

RegViz: Visual Debugging of Regular Expressions.

Fabian Beck, Stefan Gulan, Benjamin Biegel, Sebastian Baltes, and Daniel Weiskopf.
Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE-NIER 2014).
Acceptance rate: 24% (35/146).
Preprint • BibTeX

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