Faculty Member

Doctoral Researcher

Saikat Mondal

I am a Ph.D. researcher in the Software Research Lab, University of Saskatchewan, Canada, under the supervision of Professor Dr. Chanchal Roy. I am an Assistant Professor (on study leave) in Computer Science & Engineering Discipline, Khulna University, Bangladesh.

My career objectives are – conducting cutting-edge research in Software Engineering, and challenging myself with robust, emerging research problems, promoting novel, cost-effective and efficient solutions, honing my research, development and supervision skills through continuous learning, active collaborations, and extensive self-reflection.

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What I Do

Research

The quality of the content shared in crowd-sourced developer forums is paramount to ensure flawless support for software developers with their programming problems. Stack Overflow is the most popular programming-related Q&A forum with 22 million questions, 33 million answers and 17 million registered users (developers). Stack Overflow allows users to suggest edits to posts (i.e., answers and questions) to improve their quality. Unfortunately, such edits are often rejected due to undesired edits or violating edit guidelines. Moreover, subjectivity bias in deciding whether an edit is desired or not could introduce inconsistencies in the rejected edits. Such a scenario can be detrimental, frustrating and demotivating to the users who aim to provide good-quality edits. Therefore, my research first focuses on identifying the rejected edit reasons and inconsistency types. Then it offers tools and techniques to assist Stack Overflow users suggesting acceptable edits by automatically identifying rejected edits with reasons and inconsistent edits. However, locating the suggested edits that promote quality by manually investigating the posts is challenging and time-consuming. Thus, I also plan to introduce tools to identify the potential edits automatically by analyzing the contents of posts.

I employ quality metrics (e.g., reproducibility, consistency, readability), static code analysis, text processing, Machine Learning (ML), Natural Language Processing (NLP), and software repository mining in my research. My target is to support developers to improve the quality of the questions so that they receive quick and appropriate solutions, save developers' valuable time, help to continue normal development flow and improve the quality of the answers to ensure their reliable use in software development.

Leadership & Community Service

I served academic, community and professional organizations and gained experience in leadership, interpersonal communications, and executing organizational goals.

Currently, I am acting as the President of Computer Science Graduate Council (CSGC), Department of Computer Science, University of Saskatchewan, Canada, Executive Member of Khulna University Alumni Association, Canada, Social Chair of Software Research Lab, Department of Computer Science, University of Saskatchewan, Canada.

Teaching

Over the last nine years, I taught several courses and evaluated exams in three different universities in various capacities.

I have been guiding and evaluating students' software engineering projects. I also assessed the assignments of several undergraduate-level courses at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada from 2018.

I taught several undergraduate-level courses at Khulna University, Bangladesh from 2012 to 2018. I was responsible for course syllabus design, teaching classes, designing questionnaires, conducting exams, evaluating exams, and publishing the grades. Besides regular classes, I also supervised the students' software development projects and thesis.

I taught several undergraduate-level courses at North Western University, Bangladesh from 2012 to 2018 as a part-time faculty. I was responsible for teaching classes, designing questionnaires, conducting exams, evaluating exams, and publishing the grades. Besides regular classes, I also supervised the software development projects undertaken by the students.

Hobbies & Interests

I love reciting poetry, acting, writing, reading books, cooking, listening to music (especially classical, folk & spiritual songs), watching movies (primarily old movies), comedy shows, drama & lectures (especially spiritual discussion, discussion on child psychology, mind game & TED talks), programming, and solving mathematical quizzes.

Latest News

23 Dec 2021
Our study, The Reproducibility of Programming-Related Issues in Stack Overflow Questions, has been accepted in the Empirical Software Engineering (EMSE) journal.
03 Dec 2021
Our study, Reproducibility Challenges and Their Impacts on Technical Q&A Websites: The Practitioners' Perspectives, has been accepted in the Innovations in Software Engineering Conference (ISEC 2022).
03 Jan 2022
We recently deployed an online tool called EditEx that works with the Stack Overflow edit system to guide users during their editing of posts by suggesting the potential causes of rejection.
03 Jan 2022
Submitted our study, Automatic Prediction of Rejected Edits in Stack Overflow (Phase II), to Empirical Software Engineering (EMSE) journal.
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Ongoing Research Projects

EditEx (Edit Expert)

Automatic Prediction of Rejected Edits in Stack Overflow
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iEdit (Inconsistent Edit)

Edit Inconsistencies in Stack Overflow Q&A Site
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Reproducibility Challenges

Reproducibility Challenges and Their Impacts on Technical Q&A Websites: The Practitioners' Perspectives
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Questions Require Code or Not?

Automatic Identification of Stack Overflow Questions that Require Code Snippets
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