Publications

2025

Mathieu Nassif and Martin P. Robillard. Evaluating Interactive Documentation for Programmers. To appear in Empirical Software Engineering, Accepted 13 January, 2025.
Deeksha M. Arya, Jin L.C. Guo, and Martin P. Robillard. How Programmers Interact with Multimodal Software Documentation. To appear in Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering, 2025.
Mathieu Nassif and Martin P. Robillard. Non-linear Software Documentation with Interactive Code Examples. To appear in ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, Accepted on 07 October 2024, 2025.
Bhagya Chembakottu and Martin P. Robillard. Usability of Static Application Security Testing Workflows. To appear in Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on Mining Software Repositories Applications for Privacy and Security, 2025.

2024

Deeksha M. Arya, Jin L.C. Guo, and Martin P. Robillard. Why People Contribute Software Documentation. In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering, pages 91-96, May 2024.
Martin P. Robillard, Deeksha M. Arya, Neil A. Ernst, Jin L.C. Guo, Maxime Lamothe, Mathieu Nassif, Nicole Novielli, Alexander Serebrenik, Igor Steinmacher, and Klaas-Jan Stol. Communicating Study Design Trade-offs in Software Engineering. Future of Software Engineering. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, 33(5):Article 112 (10 pages), June 2024.
Deeksha M. Arya, Jin L.C. Guo, and Martin P. Robillard. Properties and Styles of Software Technology Tutorials. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 50(2): 159-172, November 2024.
Martin P. Robillard and Mathieu Nassif and Muhammad Sohail. Understanding Test Convention Consistency as a Dimension of Test Quality. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, 34(1) Article No.: 4, pages 1-39, December 2024.

2023

Mathieu Nassif and Martin P. Robillard. A Field Study of Developer Documentation Format. Late Breaking Work Paper. Extended Abstracts of the ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Article number 7 (7 pages), 2023.
Neil A. Ernst and Martin P. Robillard. A Study of Documentation for Software Architecture. Empirical Software Engineering, 28, Article number 122 (23 pages), 2023.
Deeksha M. Arya, Jin Guo, and Martin P. Robillard. How Programmers Find Online Learning Resources. Empirical Software Engineering, 28, Article number 23 (36 pages), 2023.
Mathieu Nassif and Martin P. Robillard. Identifying Concepts in Software Projects. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 49(7): 3660-3674, 2023.

2022

Deeksha M. Arya, Mathieu Nassif, and Martin P. Robillard. A Data-Centric Study of Software Tutorial Design. IEEE Software, 39(3):106-115, 2022.
Mathieu Nassif, Zara Horlacher, and Martin P. Robillard. Casdoc: Unobtrusive Explanations in Code Examples. Research Demonstration. In Proceedings of the 30th IEEE International Conference on Program Comprehension, pages 631-635, 2022.
Sebastian Baltes, Christoph Treude, and Martin P. Robillard. Contextual Documentation Referencing on Stack Overflow. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 48(1):135-149, 2022.
Alexa Hernandez, Mathieu Nassif, and Martin P. Robillard. DScribe: Co-generating Unit Tests and Documentation. Research Demonstration. In Proceedings of the 44th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering, 56-60, 2022.
Mathieu Nassif, Alexa Hernandez, Ashvitha Sridharan, and Martin P. Robillard. Generating Unit Tests for Documentation. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 48(9):3268-3279, 2022.
Martin P. Robillard. Introduction to Software Design with Java, 2nd edition. Springer, May 2022.

2021

Martin P. Robillard. Turnover-Induced Knowledge Loss in Practice. Industry Paper. In Proceedings of the 29th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, pages 1292-1302, 2021.
Mathieu Nassif and Martin P. Robillard. Wikifying Software Artifacts. Empirical Software Engineering, 26, Article number 31 (36 pages), 2021.

2020

Mathieu Nassif, Christoph Treude, and Martin P. Robillard. Automatically Categorizing Software Technologies. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 46(1):20-32, January 2020.
Deeksha Arya, Jin L.C. Guo and Martin P. Robillard. Information Correspondence between Types of Documentation for APIs. Empirical Software Engineering, 25:4069–4096, 2020.
Martin P. Robillard and Christoph Treude. Understanding Wikipedia as a Resource for Opportunistic Learning of Computing Concepts. In Proceedings of the 51st ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education, pages 72-78, February 2020.
Martin P. Robillard and Kaylee Kutschera. Lessons Learned in Migrating from Swing to JavaFX. IEEE Software, 37(3):78-85, May 2020.

2019

Mathieu Nassif and Martin P. Robillard. Constructural Software Documentation. Extended Abstract. Companion Proceedings of the 41st IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering, pages 308-309, May 2019.
Mathieu Nassif, Christoph Treude, and Martin P. Robillard. Witt: Querying Technology Terms Based on Automated Classification. Research Demonstration. Companion Proceedings of the 41st IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering, pages 53-66, May 2019.
Martin P. Robillard. Introduction to Software Design with Java. Springer, August 2019.

2018

Martin P. Robillard, Mathieu Nassif, and Shane McIntosh. Threats of Aggregating Software Repository Data. In Proceedings of the 34th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution, pages 508-518, September 2018.

2017

Martin P. Robillard, Andrian Marcus, Christoph Treude, Gabriele Bavota, Oscar Chaparro, Neil Ernst, Marco Aurélio Gerosa, Michael Godfrey, Michele Lanza, Mario Linares-Vásquez, Gail Murphy, Laura Moreno, David Shepherd and Edmund Wong. On-Demand Developer Documentation. New Ideas and Emerging Results Paper. In Proceedings of the 33rd IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution, pages 479-483, September 2017.
Mathieu Nassif and Martin P. Robillard. Revisiting Turnover-Induced Knowledge Loss in Software Projects. In Proceedings of the 33rd IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution, pages 261-272, September 2017.
Christoph Treude and Martin P. Robillard. Understanding Stack Overflow Code Fragments. New Ideas and Emerging Results Paper. In Proceedings of the 33rd IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution, pages 509-513, September 2017.
S. M. Sohan, Frank Maurer, Craig Anslow and Martin P. Robillard. A Study of the Effectiveness of Usage Examples in REST API Documentation. In Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing, pages 53-61, October 2017.
Inderjot Kaur Ratol and Martin P. Robillard. Detecting Fragile Comments . In Proceedings of the 32nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, pages 112-122, November 2017.

2016

Christoph Treude and Martin P. Robillard. Augmenting API Documentation with Insights from Stack Overflow. In Proceedings of the 38th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering, pages 392-403, May 2016.
Martin P. Robillard and Nenad Medvidovíc. Disseminating Architectural Knowledge on Open-Source Projects. In Proceedings of the 38th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering, pages 476-487, May 2016.
Eiji Adachi Barbosa, Alessandro Garcia, Martin P. Robillard, and Benjamin Jakobus. Enforcing Exception Handling Policies with a Domain-Specific Language. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 42(6):559-584, June 2016.
Martin P. Robillard. Sustainable Software Design. Visions and Reflections paper. In Proceedings of the 24th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, pages 920-923, November 2016.

2015

Gayane Petrosyan, Martin P. Robillard, and Renato de Mori. Discovering Information Explaining API Types Using Text Classification. In Proceedings of the 37th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering, pages 869-879, May 2015.
Christoph Treude, Mathieu Sicard, Marc Klocke, and Martin P. Robillard. TaskNav: Task-based Navigation of Software Documentation. Research Demonstration. In Proceedings of the 37th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering, pages 649-652, May 2015.
Christoph Treude, Martin P. Robillard, and Barthélémy Dagenais. Extracting Development Tasks to Navigate Software Documentation. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 41(6):565-581, June 2015.
Gias Uddin and Martin P. Robillard. How API Documentation Fails. IEEE Software, 32(4):68-75, June 2015.
Martin P. Robillard and Yam B. Chhetri. Recommending Reference API Documentation. Empirical Software Engineering, 20(6):1558-1586, June 2015.

2014

Martin P. Robillard and Robert J. Walker. An Introduction to Recommendation Systems in Software Engineering. Martin P. Robillard, Walid Maalej, Robert J. Walker, and Thomas Zimmermann (Eds.). Recommendation Systems in Software Engineering, Springer, pages 1-11, 2014.
Annie T. T. Ying, Martin P. Robillard. Developer Profiles for Recommendation Systems. Martin P. Robillard, Walid Maalej, Robert J. Walker, and Thomas Zimmermann (Eds.). Recommendation Systems in Software Engineering, Springer, pages 199-222, 2014.
Martin P. Robillard, Walid Maalej, Robert J. Walker, and Thomas Zimmermann (Eds.) . Recommendation Systems in Software Engineering. , Springer, ISBN 978-3-642-45134-8 , 2014.
Annie T.T. Ying and Martin P. Robillard. Selection and Presentation Practices for Code Example Summarization. In Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, pages 460-471, November 2014.
Barthélémy Dagenais and Martin P. Robillard. Using Traceability Links to Recommend Adaptive Changes for Documentation Evolution. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 40(11):1126-1146, November 2014.

2013

Martin P. Robillard, Eric Bodden, David Kawrykow, Mira Mezini, and Tristan Ratchford. Automated API Property Inference Techniques. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 39(5):613-637, May 2013.
Peter C. Rigby and Martin P. Robillard. Discovering Essential Code Elements in Informal Documentation. In Proceedings of the 35th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering, pages 832-841, May 2013.
Annie T.T. Ying and Martin P. Robillard. Code Fragment Summarization. New Ideas Paper. In Proceedings of the 9th joint meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, pages 655-658, August 2013.
Walid Maalej and Martin P. Robillard. Patterns of Knowledge in API Reference Documentation. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 39(9):1264-1282, September 2013.

2012

Ekwa Duala-Ekoko and Martin P. Robillard. Asking and Answering Questions About Unfamiliar APIs: An Exploratory Study. In Proceedings of the 34th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering, pages 266-276, June 2012.
Barthélémy Dagenais and Martin P. Robillard. Recovering Traceability Links between an API and its Learning Resources. In Proceedings of the 34th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering, pages 47-57, June 2012.
Gias Uddin, Barthélémy Dagenais, and Martin P. Robillard. Temporal Analysis of API Usage Concepts. In Proceedings of the 34th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering, pages 804-814, June 2012.

2011

David Kawrykow and Martin P. Robillard . Non-Essential Changes in Version Histories. In Proceedings of the 33rd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering, pages 351-360, May 2011.
Martin P. Robillard and Robert DeLine. A Field Study of API Learning Obstacles. Empirical Software Engineering, 16(6): 703-732, June 2011.
Annie T.T. Ying and Martin P. Robillard. The Influence of the Task on Programmer Behaviour. In Proceedings of the 19th IEEE International Conference on Program Comprehension, pages 31-40, June 2011.
Ekwa Duala-Ekoko and Martin P. Robillard. Using Structure-Based Recommendations to Facilitate Discoverability in APIs. In Proceedings of the 25th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, pages 79-104, July 2011.
Barthélémy Dagenais and Martin P. Robillard. Recommending Adaptive Changes for Framework Evolution. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, 20(4), September 2011.

2010

Martin P. Robillard and Barthélémy Dagenais. Recommending Change Clusters to Support Software Investigation: An Empirical Study. Journal of Software Maintenance and Evolution: Research and Practice, 22(3):143-164, April 2010.
Barthélémy Dagenais, Harold Ossher, Rachel K.E. Bellamy, Martin P. Robillard, and Jacqueline P. de Vries. Moving into a New Software Project Landscape. In Proceedings of the 32nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering, pages 275-284, May 2010.
Ekwa Duala-Ekoko and Martin P. Robillard. Clone Region Descriptors: Representing and Tracking Duplication in Source Code. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, 20(1):1-31, June 2010.
Martin P. Robillard, Robert J. Walker and Thomas Zimmermann. Recommendations Systems for Software Engineering. IEEE Software, 27(4):80-86, June 2010.
Barthélémy Dagenais and Martin P. Robillard. Creating and Evolving Developer Documentation: Understanding the Decisions of Open Source Contributors. In Proceedings of the 18th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, pages 127-136, November 2010.

2009

Barthélémy Dagenais and Martin P. Robillard. SemDiff: Analysis and Recommendation Support for API Evolution. Research Demonstration. In Proceedings of the 31th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering, pages 599-602, May 2009.
Ekwa Duala-Ekoko and Martin P. Robillard. A Detailed Examination of the Correlation Between Imports and Failure-Proneness of Software Components. In Proceedings of the 3rd International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering, pages 34-43, October 2009.
Reid Holmes, Tristan Ratchford, Martin P. Robillard, and Robert J. Walker. Automatically Recommending Triage Decisions for Pragmatic Reuse Tasks. In Proceedings of the 24th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, pages 397-408, November 2009.
David Kawrykow and Martin P. Robillard. Improving API Usage through Detection of Redundant Code. In Proceedings of the 24th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, pages 111-122, November 2009.
Martin P. Robillard. What Makes APIs Hard to Learn? Answers from Developers. IEEE Software, 26(6):27-34, November 2009.

2008

Ekwa Duala-Ekoko and Martin P. Robillard. CloneTracker: Tool Support for Code Clones Management. Research Demonstration. In Proceedings of the 30th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering, pages 843-846, May 2008.
Barthélémy Dagenais and Martin P. Robillard. Recommending Adaptive Changes for Framework Evolution. In Proceedings of the 30th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering, pages 481-490, May 2008.
Martin P. Robillard and Putra Manggala. Reusing Program Investigation Knowledge for Code Understanding. In Proceedings of the 16th IEEE International Conference on Program Comprehension, pages 202-211, June 2008.
Martin P. Robillard. Topology Analysis of Software Dependencies. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, 17(4):Article 18 (36 pages), August 2008.
Martin P. Robillard and Barthélémy Dagenais. Retrieving Task-Related Clusters from Change History. In Proceedings of the 15th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering, pages 17-26, October 2008.

2007

Martin P. Robillard and Gail C. Murphy. Representing Concerns in Source Code. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, 16(1):1-38, February 2007.
Isaac Yuen and Martin P. Robillard. Bridging the Gap between Aspect Mining and Refactoring. AOSD 2007 Workshop on Linking Aspect Technology and Evolution, Article No. 1, March 2007.
Frédéric Weigand-Warr and Martin P. Robillard. Suade: Topology-Based Searches for Software Investigation. Research Demonstration. In Proceedings of the 29th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering, pages 780-783, May 2007.
Ekwa Duala-Ekoko and Martin P. Robillard. Tracking Code Clones in Evolving Software. In Proceedings of the 29th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering, pages 158-167, May 2007.
Brian De Alwis, Gail C. Murphy, and Martin P. Robillard. A Comparative Study of Three Program Exploration Tools. In Proceedings of the 15th IEEE International Conference on Program Comprehension, pages 103-112, June 2007.
Martin P. Robillard, David Shepherd, Emily Hill, K. Vijay-Shanker, and Lori Pollock. An Empirical Study of the Concept Assignment Problem. Technical Report SOCS-TR-2007.3. School of Computer Science, McGill University, Montréal, QC, Canada, June 2007.
Barthélémy Dagenais, Silvia Breu, Frédéric Weigand Warr and Martin P. Robillard. Inferring Structural Patterns for Concern Traceability in Evolving Software. In Proceedings of the 22nd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, pages 254-263, November 2007.

2006

Jean-Sébastien Boulanger and Martin P. Robillard. Managing Concern Interfaces. In Proceedings of the 22nd IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance, pages 14-23, September 2006.
Martin P. Robillard. Tracking Concerns in Evolving Source Code: An Empirical Study. Short Paper. In Proceedings of the 22nd IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance, pages 479-482, September 2006.
Olivier Giroux and Martin P. Robillard. Detecting Increases in Feature Coupling using Regression Tests. In Proceedings of the 14th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, pages 163-173, November 2006.

2005

Gail C. Murphy, Mik Kersten, Martin P. Robillard, and Davor Cubranic. The Emergent Structure of Development Tasks. Invited Paper. In Proceedings of the 19th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, pages 33-48, July 2005.
Martin P. Robillard. Automatic Generation of Suggestions for Program Investigation. In Proceedings of the 10th European Software Engineering Conference and 13th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, pages 11-20, September 2005.
Martin P. Robillard and Frédéric Weigand-Warr. ConcernMapper: Simple View-Based Separation of Scattered Concerns. In Proceedings of the Eclipse Technology Exchange at OOPSLA, pages 65-69, October 2005.
Imran Majid and Martin P. Robillard. NaCIN - An Eclipse Plug-In for Program Navigation-based Concern Inference. In Proceedings of the Eclipse Technology Exchange at OOPSLA, 70-74, October 2005.

2004

Martin P. Robillard and Gail C. Murphy. Program Navigation Analysis to Support Task-aware Software Development Environments. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Directions in Software Engineering Environments, pages 83-88, May 2004.
Martin P. Robillard, Wesley Coelho, and Gail C. Murphy. How Effective Developers Investigate Source Code: An Exploratory Study. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 30(12):889-903, December 2004.

2003

Martin P. Robillard and Gail C. Murphy. Static Analysis to Support the Evolution of Exception Structure in Object-Oriented Systems. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, 12(2):191-221, April 2003.
Martin P. Robillard and Gail C. Murphy. FEAT: A Tool for Locating, Describing, and Analyzing Concerns in Source Code. Research Demonstration. In Proceedings of the 25th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering, pages 822-823, May 2003.
Martin P. Robillard and Gail C. Murphy. Automatically Inferring Concern Code from Program Investigation Activities. In Proceedings of the 18th IEEE International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, pages 225-234, October 2003.
Martin P. Robillard. Representing Concerns in Source Code. Ph.D. Thesis. Department of Computer Science, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada, November 2003.

2002

Martin P. Robillard and Gail C. Murphy. Concern Graphs: Finding and Describing Concerns Using Structural Program Dependencies. In Proceedings of the 24th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering, pages 406-416, May 2002.

2001

Gail C. Murphy, Albert Lai, Robert J. Walker, and Martin P. Robillard. Separating Features in Source Code: An Exploratory Study. In Proceedings of the 23rd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering, pages 275-284, May 2001.
Gail C. Murphy, Robert J. Walker, Elisa L.A. Baniassad, Martin P. Robillard, Albert Lai, and Mik A. Kersten. Does Aspect-oriented Programming Work?. Communication of the ACM, 44(10):75-77, October 2001.

2000

Pierre N. Robillard and Martin P. Robillard. Types of Collaborative Work in Software Engineering. Journal of Systems and Software, 53(3):219-224, September 2000.
Martin P. Robillard and Gail C. Murphy. Designing Robust Java Programs with Exceptions. In Proceedings of the 8th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, pages 2-10, November 2000.
Robert J. Walker, Gail C. Murphy, Jeffrey Steinbok, and Martin P. Robillard. Efficient Mapping of Software System Traces to Architectural Views. In Proceedings of the 2000 Conference of the Centre for Advanced Studies on Collaborative Research, pages 31-40, November 2000.

1999

Martin P. Robillard and Gail C. Murphy. Analyzing Exception Flow in Java Programs. In Proceedings of the 7th European Software Engineering Conference and 7th ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, pages 322-337, September 1999.
Martin P. Robillard. Analyzing Exception Flow in Java Programs. Master's Thesis. Department of Computer Science, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada, September 1999.

1998

Pierre N. Robillard and Martin Robillard. Improving Academic Software Engineering Projects: A Comparative Study of Academic and Industry Projects. Annals of Software Engineering, 6:343-363, March 1998.