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Verified email domains

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Other IDs

Scopus Author ID: 36631133800

Countries

United Kingdom

Biography

Federica Sarro is a Professor of Software Engineering in the Department of Computer Science at University College London, where she is the Head of the Software Systems Engineering group.

She has extensive academic and industrial expertise in Search-Based Software Engineering, Automated Software Engineering, Empirical Software Engineering and Software Analytics, with a focus on automated software management, requirements, testing, repair, and optimisation. On these topics she has co-authored over 100 papers regularly publishing in all the most prestigious SE conferences and journals such as ACM/IEEE ICSE, ACM FSE, IEEE ISSTA, IEEE RE, IEEE TSE ACM TOSEM. She has given several invited talks at academic and industrial international events, and worked in collaboration with several companies including Meta, Google, Bloomberg, and Microsoft.
She has received 10 international awards for her research, including the ICSE'24 and FSE'19 ACM Distinguished Paper Awards, as well as several appreciations for her community service and high-quality work as a reviewer, including the ACM Distinguished Reviewer Award received at ICSE both in 2018 and 2020. In recognition of her “excellence in Software Engineering research with scholarly and real-world impact” she has received the IEEE TCSE Rising Star Award in 2021. In addition, she was awarded the prestigious LERO Parnas Fellowship in 2023.

Prof. Sarro has served the SE community in numerous ways. She has been invited to be the Program Chair of seven international conferences including IEEE/ACM ASE 2023, IEEE ICSME 2021, IEEE/ACM ESEM 2020, IEEE ICPC 2019. She has been elected by the community on the Steering Committee of several events including ICSME, ESEM and ICPC. She has also been invited to serve in several Organizing Committees, including FSE (2025, 2024, 2020), ICSE (2025,2024, 2023, 2021) and RE (2015). Besides, she has been Area Chair for ASE, Program Board member for ICSE, and Program Committee member of over 60 international events, and an Editorial and Reviewer Board member of prestigious journals including ACM TOSEM and IEEE TSE. She has been elected as ExCom member of the IEEE Computer Society (CS) Technical Community on Software Engineering (TCSE) for two consecutive terms (2021-2023 and 2024-2026), in this role she has co-chaired the IEEE TCSE Awards (which recognise internationally leading academics in several categories) and the Diversity & Inclusion Programme (which supports D&I activities within IEEE CS sponsored conferences and broader initiatives).

Activities

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Employment (3)

University College London: London, GB

2020-10-01 to present | Full Professor (Computer Science)
Employment
Source: Self-asserted source
Federica Sarro

University College London: London, GB

2017-03-01 to 2020-09-30 | Associate Professor (Computer Science)
Employment
Source: Self-asserted source
Federica Sarro

University College London: London, GB

2016-02-01 to 2017-07-31 | Senior Research Fellow (Computer Science)
Employment
Source: Self-asserted source
Federica Sarro

Education and qualifications (1)

Università degli Studi di Salerno: Fisciano, IT

2013-02 | PhD in Systems and Software Engineering (Computer Science)
Education
Source: Self-asserted source
Federica Sarro

Works (50 of 127)

Items per page:
Page 1 of 3

Agile Effort Estimation: Have We Solved the Problem Yet? Insights From a Replication Study

IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
2023 | Journal article
DOI: 10.1109/TSE.2022.3228739
EID:

2-s2.0-85144795677

Part of ISSN: 19393520 00985589
Contributors: Tawosi, V.; Moussa, R.; Sarro, F.
Source: Self-asserted source
Federica Sarro via Scopus - Elsevier

Multi-objective search for gender-fair and semantically correct word embeddings

Applied Soft Computing
2023 | Journal article
DOI: 10.1016/j.asoc.2022.109916
EID:

2-s2.0-85145659097

Part of ISSN: 15684946
Contributors: Hort, M.; Moussa, R.; Sarro, F.
Source: Self-asserted source
Federica Sarro via Scopus - Elsevier

A Comprehensive Empirical Study of Bias Mitigation Methods for Machine Learning Classifiers

arXiv
2022 | Other
DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2207.03277
EID:

2-s2.0-85147687943

Part of ISSN: 23318422
Contributors: Chen, Z.; Zhang, J.M.; Sarro, F.; Harman, M.
Source: Self-asserted source
Federica Sarro via Scopus - Elsevier

A Survey of Performance Optimization for Mobile Applications

IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
2022 | Journal article
DOI: 10.1109/TSE.2021.3071193
EID:

2-s2.0-85103907745

Part of ISSN: 19393520 00985589
Contributors: Hort, M.; Kechagia, M.; Sarro, F.; Harman, M.
Source: Self-asserted source
Federica Sarro via Scopus - Elsevier

A Versatile Dataset of Agile Open Source Software Projects

arXiv
2022 | Other
EID:

2-s2.0-85124786732

Part of ISSN: 23318422
Contributors: Tawosi, V.; Al-Subaihin, A.; Moussa, R.; Sarro, F.
Source: Self-asserted source
Federica Sarro via Scopus - Elsevier

A Versatile Dataset of Agile Open Source Software Projects

Proceedings - 2022 Mining Software Repositories Conference, MSR 2022
2022 | Conference paper
DOI: 10.1145/3524842.3528029
EID:

2-s2.0-85134059219
Contributors: Tawosi, V.; Al-Subaihin, A.; Moussa, R.; Sarro, F.
Source: Self-asserted source
Federica Sarro via Scopus - Elsevier

Agile Effort Estimation: Have We Solved the Problem Yet? Insights From A Replication Study

arXiv
2022 | Other
DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2201.05401
EID:

2-s2.0-85146305632

Part of ISSN: 23318422
Contributors: Tawosi, V.; Moussa, R.; Sarro, F.
Source: Self-asserted source
Federica Sarro via Scopus - Elsevier

Agile Effort Estimation: Have We Solved the Problem Yet? Insights From A Second Replication Study (GPT2SP Replication Report)

arXiv
2022 | Other
DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2209.00437
EID:

2-s2.0-85138319254

Part of ISSN: 23318422
Contributors: Tawosi, V.; Moussa, R.; Sarro, F.
Source: Self-asserted source
Federica Sarro via Scopus - Elsevier

An Empirical Study on the Fairness of Pre-trained Word Embeddings

GeBNLP 2022 - 4th Workshop on Gender Bias in Natural Language Processing, Proceedings of the Workshop
2022 | Conference paper
EID:

2-s2.0-85137541268
Contributors: Sesari, E.; Hort, M.; Sarro, F.
Source: Self-asserted source
Federica Sarro via Scopus - Elsevier

Bias Mitigation for Machine Learning Classifiers: A Comprehensive Survey

arXiv
2022 | Other
DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2207.07068
EID:

2-s2.0-85134873738

Part of ISSN: 23318422
Contributors: Hort, M.; Chen, Z.; Zhang, J.M.; Sarro, F.; Harman, M.
Source: Self-asserted source
Federica Sarro via Scopus - Elsevier

Comparing Fuzzers on a Level Playing Field with FuzzBench

Proceedings - 2022 IEEE 15th International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation, ICST 2022
2022 | Conference paper
DOI: 10.1109/ICST53961.2022.00039
EID:

2-s2.0-85133304110
Contributors: Asprone, D.; Metzman, J.; Arya, A.; Guizzo, G.; Sarro, F.
Source: Self-asserted source
Federica Sarro via Scopus - Elsevier

Do Not Take It for Granted: Comparing Open-Source Libraries for Software Development Effort Estimation

arXiv
2022 | Other
DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2207.01705
EID:

2-s2.0-85134411641

Part of ISSN: 23318422
Contributors: Moussa, R.; Sarro, F.
Source: Self-asserted source
Federica Sarro via Scopus - Elsevier

Enhanced Fairness Testing via Generating Effective Initial Individual Discriminatory Instances

arXiv
2022 | Other
DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2209.08321
EID:

2-s2.0-85138909165

Part of ISSN: 23318422
Contributors: Ma, M.; Tian, Z.; Hort, M.; Sarro, F.; Zhang, H.; Lin, Q.; Zhang, D.
Source: Self-asserted source
Federica Sarro via Scopus - Elsevier

Evaluating Automatic Program Repair Capabilities to Repair API Misuses

IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
2022 | Journal article
DOI: 10.1109/TSE.2021.3067156
EID:

2-s2.0-85103281976

Part of ISSN: 19393520 00985589
Contributors: Kechagia, M.; Mechtaev, S.; Sarro, F.; Harman, M.
Source: Self-asserted source
Federica Sarro via Scopus - Elsevier

Fairness Testing: A Comprehensive Survey and Analysis of Trends

arXiv
2022 | Other
DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2207.10223
EID:

2-s2.0-85134996083

Part of ISSN: 23318422
Contributors: Chen, Z.; Zhang, J.M.; Hort, M.; Sarro, F.; Harman, M.
Source: Self-asserted source
Federica Sarro via Scopus - Elsevier

Green AI: Do Deep Learning Frameworks Have Different Costs?

Proceedings - International Conference on Software Engineering
2022 | Conference paper
DOI: 10.1145/3510003.3510221
EID:

2-s2.0-85132392011

Part of ISSN: 02705257
Contributors: Georgiou, S.; Kechagia, M.; Sharma, T.; Sarro, F.; Zou, Y.
Source: Self-asserted source
Federica Sarro via Scopus - Elsevier

How do Android developers improve non-functional properties of software?

Empirical Software Engineering
2022 | Journal article
DOI: 10.1007/s10664-022-10137-2
EID:

2-s2.0-85131008864

Part of ISSN: 15737616 13823256
Contributors: Callan, J.; Krauss, O.; Petke, J.; Sarro, F.
Source: Self-asserted source
Federica Sarro via Scopus - Elsevier

Identifying Software Engineering Challenges in Software SMEs: A Case Study in Thailand

Proceedings - 2022 IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering, SANER 2022
2022 | Conference paper
DOI: 10.1109/SANER53432.2022.00036
EID:

2-s2.0-85135794920
Contributors: Ragkhitwetsagul, C.; Krinke, J.; Choetkiertikul, M.; Sunetnanta, T.; Sarro, F.
Source: Self-asserted source
Federica Sarro via Scopus - Elsevier

Investigating the Effectiveness of Clustering for Story Point Estimation

Proceedings - 2022 IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering, SANER 2022
2022 | Conference paper
DOI: 10.1109/SANER53432.2022.00101
EID:

2-s2.0-85134036873
Contributors: Tawosi, V.; Al-Subaihin, A.; Sarro, F.
Source: Self-asserted source
Federica Sarro via Scopus - Elsevier

Investigating the Use of One-Class Support Vector Machine for Software Defect Prediction

arXiv
2022 | Other
EID:

2-s2.0-85126224823

Part of ISSN: 23318422
Contributors: Moussa, R.; Azar, D.; Sarro, F.
Source: Self-asserted source
Federica Sarro via Scopus - Elsevier

Learning From Mistakes: Machine Learning Enhanced Human Expert Effort Estimates

IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
2022 | Journal article
DOI: 10.1109/TSE.2020.3040793
EID:

2-s2.0-85097374601

Part of ISSN: 19393520 00985589
Contributors: Sarro, F.; Moussa, R.; Petrozziello, A.; Harman, M.
Source: Self-asserted source
Federica Sarro via Scopus - Elsevier

Leveraging Transfer Learning to Enable the Use of Approximate Cosmic Measures for Early Effort Estimation

SSRN
2022 | Other
EID:

2-s2.0-85123488895

Part of ISSN: 15565068
Contributors: Corazza, A.; Martino, S.D.; Ferrucci, F.; Gravino, C.; Sarro, F.
Source: Self-asserted source
Federica Sarro via Scopus - Elsevier

MAAT: a novel ensemble approach to addressing fairness and performance bugs for machine learning software

ESEC/FSE 2022 - Proceedings of the 30th ACM Joint Meeting European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering
2022 | Conference paper
DOI: 10.1145/3540250.3549093
EID:

2-s2.0-85134913726
Contributors: Chen, Z.; Zhang, J.M.; Sarro, F.; Harman, M.
Source: Self-asserted source
Federica Sarro via Scopus - Elsevier

MEG: Multi-objective Ensemble Generation for Software Defect Prediction

International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement
2022 | Conference paper
DOI: 10.1145/3544902.3546255
EID:

2-s2.0-85139862919

Part of ISSN: 19493789 19493770
Contributors: Moussa, R.; Guizzo, G.; Sarro, F.
Source: Self-asserted source
Federica Sarro via Scopus - Elsevier

Multi-Objective Software Effort Estimation: A Replication Study

IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
2022 | Journal article
DOI: 10.1109/TSE.2021.3083360
EID:

2-s2.0-85107206478

Part of ISSN: 19393520 00985589
Contributors: Tawosi, V.; Sarro, F.; Petrozziello, A.; Harman, M.
Source: Self-asserted source
Federica Sarro via Scopus - Elsevier

On the Relationship Between Story Points and Development Effort in Agile Open-Source Software

International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement
2022 | Conference paper
DOI: 10.1145/3544902.3546238
EID:

2-s2.0-85139842211

Part of ISSN: 19493789 19493770
Contributors: Tawosi, V.; Moussa, R.; Sarro, F.
Source: Self-asserted source
Federica Sarro via Scopus - Elsevier

On the use of evaluation measures for defect prediction studies

ISSTA 2022 - Proceedings of the 31st ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis
2022 | Conference paper
DOI: 10.1145/3533767.3534405
EID:

2-s2.0-85134388414
Contributors: Moussa, R.; Sarro, F.
Source: Self-asserted source
Federica Sarro via Scopus - Elsevier

Privileged and Unprivileged Groups: An Empirical Study on the Impact of the Age Attribute on Fairness

Proceedings - International Workshop on Equitable Data and Technology, FairWare 2022
2022 | Conference paper
DOI: 10.1145/3524491.3527308
EID:

2-s2.0-85138733165
Contributors: Hort, M.; Sarro, F.
Source: Self-asserted source
Federica Sarro via Scopus - Elsevier

Py2Cy: A Genetic Improvement Tool To Speed Up Python

GECCO 2022 Companion - Proceedings of the 2022 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference
2022 | Conference paper
DOI: 10.1145/3520304.3534037
EID:

2-s2.0-85136331563
Contributors: Zhong, J.; Hort, M.; Sarro, F.
Source: Self-asserted source
Federica Sarro via Scopus - Elsevier

Sentinel: A Hyper-Heuristic for the Generation of Mutant Reduction Strategies

IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
2022 | Journal article
DOI: 10.1109/TSE.2020.3002496
EID:

2-s2.0-85086718042

Part of ISSN: 19393520 00985589
Contributors: Guizzo, G.; Sarro, F.; Krinke, J.; Vergilio, S.R.
Source: Self-asserted source
Federica Sarro via Scopus - Elsevier

Test-based Patch Clustering for Automatically-Generated Patches Assessment

arXiv
2022 | Other
DOI: 10.48550/arXiv.2207.11082
EID:

2-s2.0-85135448689

Part of ISSN: 23318422
Contributors: Martinez, M.; Kechagia, M.; Perera, A.; Petke, J.; Sarro, F.; Aleti, A.
Source: Self-asserted source
Federica Sarro via Scopus - Elsevier

A Survey on Machine Learning Techniques for Source Code Analysis

arXiv
2021 | Other
EID:

2-s2.0-85139891197

Part of ISSN: 23318422
Contributors: Sharma, T.; Kechagia, M.; Georgiou, S.; Tiwari, R.; Vats, I.; Moazen, H.; Sarro, F.
Source: Self-asserted source
Federica Sarro via Scopus - Elsevier

App Store Effects on Software Engineering Practices

IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
2021 | Journal article
DOI: 10.1109/TSE.2019.2891715
EID:

2-s2.0-85100900702

Part of ISSN: 19393520 00985589
Contributors: Al-Subaihin, A.A.; Sarro, F.; Black, S.; Capra, L.; Harman, M.
Source: Self-asserted source
Federica Sarro via Scopus - Elsevier

Artefact Relation Graphs for Unit Test Reuse Recommendation

Proceedings - 2021 IEEE 14th International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation, ICST 2021
2021 | Conference paper
DOI: 10.1109/ICST49551.2021.00025
EID:

2-s2.0-85107910921
Contributors: White, R.; Krinke, J.; Barr, E.T.; Sarro, F.; Ragkhitwetsagul, C.
Source: Self-asserted source
Federica Sarro via Scopus - Elsevier

Artifact for Enhancing Genetic Improvement of Software with Regression Test Selection

Proceedings - International Conference on Software Engineering
2021 | Conference paper
DOI: 10.1109/ICSE-Companion52605.2021.00099
EID:

2-s2.0-85115668895

Part of ISSN: 02705257
Contributors: Guizzo, G.; Petke, J.; Sarro, F.; Harman, M.
Source: Self-asserted source
Federica Sarro via Scopus - Elsevier

Did You Do Your Homework? Raising Awareness on Software Fairness and Discrimination

Proceedings - 2021 36th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, ASE 2021
2021 | Conference paper
DOI: 10.1109/ASE51524.2021.9678568
EID:

2-s2.0-85125489532
Contributors: Hort, M.; Sarro, F.
Source: Self-asserted source
Federica Sarro via Scopus - Elsevier

Diversifying Focused Testing for Unit Testing

ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology
2021 | Journal article
DOI: 10.1145/3447265
EID:

2-s2.0-85112081320

Part of ISSN: 15577392 1049331X
Contributors: Menéndez, H.D.; Jahangirova, G.; Sarro, F.; Tonella, P.; Clark, D.
Source: Self-asserted source
Federica Sarro via Scopus - Elsevier

Do users care about ad's performance costs? Exploring the effects of the performance costs of in-app ads on user experience

Information and Software Technology
2021 | Journal article
DOI: 10.1016/j.infsof.2020.106471
EID:

2-s2.0-85095598312

Part of ISSN: 09505849
Contributors: Gao, C.; Zeng, J.; Sarro, F.; Lo, D.; King, I.; Lyu, M.R.
Source: Self-asserted source
Federica Sarro via Scopus - Elsevier

Enhancing genetic improvement of software with regression test selection

Proceedings - International Conference on Software Engineering
2021 | Conference paper
DOI: 10.1109/ICSE43902.2021.00120
EID:

2-s2.0-85111001946

Part of ISSN: 02705257
Contributors: Guizzo, G.; Petke, J.; Sarro, F.; Harman, M.
Source: Self-asserted source
Federica Sarro via Scopus - Elsevier

Fairea: A model behaviour mutation approach to benchmarking bias mitigation methods

ESEC/FSE 2021 - Proceedings of the 29th ACM Joint Meeting European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering
2021 | Conference paper
DOI: 10.1145/3468264.3468565
EID:

2-s2.0-85112713401
Contributors: Hort, M.; Zhang, J.M.; Sarro, F.; Harman, M.
Source: Self-asserted source
Federica Sarro via Scopus - Elsevier

Message from the General Co-Chairs and Program Co-Chairs ICSME 2021

Proceedings - 2021 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution, ICSME 2021
2021 | Conference paper
DOI: 10.1109/ICSME52107.2021.00005
EID:

2-s2.0-85123381390
Contributors: Le Traon, Y.; Papadakis, M.; Sarro, F.; Tsantalis, N.
Source: Self-asserted source
Federica Sarro via Scopus - Elsevier

Message from the Poster Track Chairs of ICSE 2021

Proceedings - International Conference on Software Engineering
2021 | Conference paper
DOI: 10.1109/ICSE-Companion52605.2021.00009
EID:

2-s2.0-85115721373

Part of ISSN: 02705257
Contributors: Fucci, D.; Sarro, F.
Source: Self-asserted source
Federica Sarro via Scopus - Elsevier

Refining Fitness Functions for Search-Based Automated Program Repair: A Case Study with ARJA and ARJA-e

Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
2021 | Book
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-88106-1_12
EID:

2-s2.0-85117109280

Part of ISSN: 16113349 03029743
Contributors: Guizzo, G.; Blot, A.; Callan, J.; Petke, J.; Sarro, F.
Source: Self-asserted source
Federica Sarro via Scopus - Elsevier

Sentinel: A hyper-heuristic for the generation of mutant reduction strategies

arXiv
2021 | Other
EID:

2-s2.0-85104110076

Part of ISSN: 23318422
Contributors: Guizzo, G.; Sarro, F.; Krinke, J.; Vergilio, S.R.
Source: Self-asserted source
Federica Sarro via Scopus - Elsevier

The Assessor's Dilemma: Improving Bug Repair via Empirical Game Theory

IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
2021 | Journal article
DOI: 10.1109/TSE.2019.2944608
EID:

2-s2.0-85073034995

Part of ISSN: 19393520 00985589
Contributors: Gavidia-Calderon, C.; Sarro, F.; Harman, M.; Barr, E.T.
Source: Self-asserted source
Federica Sarro via Scopus - Elsevier

The effect of offspring population size on NSGA-II: A preliminary study

GECCO 2021 Companion - Proceedings of the 2021 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference Companion
2021 | Conference paper
DOI: 10.1145/3449726.3459479
EID:

2-s2.0-85111009016
Contributors: Hort, M.; Sarro, F.
Source: Self-asserted source
Federica Sarro via Scopus - Elsevier

A new approach to distribute MOEA pareto front computation

GECCO 2020 Companion - Proceedings of the 2020 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference Companion
2020 | Conference paper
DOI: 10.1145/3377929.3390024
EID:

2-s2.0-85089735819
Contributors: Sarro, F.; Petrozziello, A.; He, D.-Q.; Yoo, S.
Source: Self-asserted source
Federica Sarro via Scopus - Elsevier

Assessing the effectiveness of approximate functional sizing approaches for effort estimation

Information and Software Technology
2020 | Journal article
DOI: 10.1016/j.infsof.2020.106308
EID:

2-s2.0-85083290763

Part of ISSN: 09505849
Contributors: Di Martino, S.; Ferrucci, F.; Gravino, C.; Sarro, F.
Source: Self-asserted source
Federica Sarro via Scopus - Elsevier

Cost measures matter for mutation testing study validity

ESEC/FSE 2020 - Proceedings of the 28th ACM Joint Meeting European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering
2020 | Conference paper
DOI: 10.1145/3368089.3409742
EID:

2-s2.0-85097129541
Contributors: Guizzo, G.; Sarro, F.; Harman, M.
Source: Self-asserted source
Federica Sarro via Scopus - Elsevier

Empirical standards for software engineering research

arXiv
2020 | Other
EID:

2-s2.0-85105894986

Part of ISSN: 23318422
Contributors: Ralph, P.; Ali, N.B.; Baltes, S.; Bianculli, D.; Diaz, J.; Dittrich, Y.; Ernst, N.; Felderer, M.; Feldt, R.; Filieri, A. et al.
Source: Self-asserted source
Federica Sarro via Scopus - Elsevier
Items per page:
Page 1 of 3

Peer review (7 reviews for 5 publications/grants)

Review activity for Automated software engineering. (1)
Review activity for Empirical software engineering. (1)
Review activity for International journal of information management data insights. (1)
Review activity for Science of computer programming. (1)
Review activity for The Journal of systems and software. (3)
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