Sebastian Baltes

Sebastian Baltes

School of Computer and Mathematical Sciences

Faculty of Sciences, Engineering and Technology

Sebastian Baltes is an Adjunct Professor in the School of Computer Science at the University of Adelaide, Australia. He received his PhD degree in Computer Science from the University of Trier, Germany. In his research, he empirically analyses software developers' work habits to to identify potential tool and process improvements. For him, thoroughly analysing and understanding the state-of-practice is an essential first step towards improving how software is being developed.

In my research, I empirically analyze software developers' work habits to identify potential tool and process improvements. For me, thoroughly analysing and understanding the state-of-practice is an essential first step towards improving how software is being developed. Too often, decisions in software projects are still rather opinion-based than data-informed. My long-term goal is to bridge the gap between empirical research and practice, both by studying relevant phenomena and by communicating the results back to practitioners.

More information about my research can be found on my personal website.

  • Appointments
    Date Position Institution name
    2024 - ongoing Adjunct Professor University of Adelaide
    2023 - ongoing Professor University of Bayreuth
    2021 - 2024 Principal Expert, Empirical Software Engineering SAP SE
    2020 - 2021 Senior Software Engineer QAware GmbH
    2020 - 2024 Adjunct Lecturer University of Adelaide
    2019 - 2020 Lecturer University of Adelaide
    2019 - 2019 Postdoctoral researcher University of Trier
    2013 - 2019 Doctoral researcher University of Trier
    2012 - 2012 Software Developer JAM Software GmbH

  • Language Competencies
    Language Competency
    English Can read, write, speak, understand spoken and peer review
    German Can read, write, speak, understand spoken and peer review

  • Education
    Date Institution name Country Title
    2013 - 2019 University of Trier Germany PhD
    2012 - 2013 Linnaeus University Sweden Exchange Semester
    2010 - 2013 University of Trier Germany MSc
    2007 - 2010 University of Trier Germany BSc

  • Research Interests
    Computer Software Computer-Human Interaction Open Software Software Engineering

  • Journals
    Year Citation
    2025 Hyrynsalmi, S. M., Baltes, S., Brown, C., Prikladnicki, R., Rodriguez-Perez, G., Serebrenik, A., . . . Liebel, G. (2025). Making Software Development More Diverse and Inclusive: Key Themes, Challenges, and Future Directions. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, 34(5), 1-23.
    DOI
    2024 Russo, D., Baltes, S., van Berkel, N., Avgeriou, P., Calefato, F., Cabrero-Daniel, B., . . . Vasilescu, B. (2024). Generative AI in Software Engineering Must Be Human-Centered: The Copenhagen Manifesto. Journal of Systems and Software, 216, 112115.
    DOI Scopus8
    2023 van Breukelen, S., Barcomb, A., Baltes, S., & Serebrenik, A. (2023). "STILL AROUND": Experiences and Survival Strategies of Veteran Women Software Developers. 2023 IEEE/ACM 45TH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON SOFTWARE ENGINEERING, ICSE, 1148-1160.
    DOI Scopus13
    2023 Torres, A., Baltes, S., Treude, C., & Wagner, M. (2023). Applying information theory to software evolution. Proceedings - 2023 IEEE/ACM 2nd International Workshop on Natural Language-Based Software Engineering, NLBSE 2023, 48-55.
    DOI
    2023 Xiao, T., Baltes, S., Hata, H., Treude, C., Kula, R. G., Ishio, T., & Matsumoto, K. (2023). 18 million links in commit messages: purpose, evolution, and decay. Empirical Software Engineering, 28(4), 29 pages.
    DOI Scopus4
    2023 Böhme, L., Wuttke, T., Teusner, R., Perscheid, M., Baltes, S., Matthies, C., & Bender, B. (2023). From Full-fledged ERP Systems Towards Process-centric Business Process
    Platforms.
    2023 Baltes, S., Pfitzmann, B., Kowark, T., Treude, C., & Beck, F. (2023). Visually Analyzing Company-wide Software Service Dependencies: An
    Industrial Case Study.
    2022 Hata, H., Novielli, N., Baltes, S., Kula, R. G., & Treude, C. (2022). GitHub Discussions: An exploratory study of early adoption. Empirical Software Engineering, 27(1), 1-32.
    DOI Scopus30 WoS6
    2022 Kula, R. G., Treude, C., Hata, H., Baltes, S., Steinmacher, I., Gerosa, M. A., & Kula Amini, W. (2022). Challenges for Inclusion in Software Engineering: The Case of the Emerging Papua New Guinean Society. IEEE Software, 39(3), 67-76.
    DOI Scopus2
    2022 Baltes, S., & Ralph, P. (2022). Sampling in software engineering research: a critical review and guidelines. Empirical Software Engineering, 27(4), 31 pages.
    DOI Scopus190 WoS37
    2022 Baltes, S., Treude, C., & Robillard, M. P. (2022). Contextual documentation referencing on stack overflow. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 48(1), 135-149.
    DOI Scopus11 WoS6
    2022 Ralph, P., & Baltes, S. (2022). Paving the way for mature secondary research: the seven types of literature review. Proceedings of the 30th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, 1632-1636.
    DOI Scopus27
    2021 Moseler, O., Lemmer, F., Baltes, S., & Diehl, S. (2021). On the diversity and frequency of code related to mathematical formulas in real-world Java projects. Journal of Systems and Software, 172, 16 pages.
    DOI
    2021 Baltes, S., & Dashuber, V. (2021). UX Debt: Developers Borrow While Users Pay.
    2020 Ralph, P., Ali, N. B., Baltes, S., Bianculli, D., Diaz, J., Dittrich, Y., . . . Vegas, S. (2020). Empirical Standards for Software Engineering Research.
    2020 Baltes, S., Park, G., & Serebrenik, A. (2020). Is 40 the New 60? How Popular Media Portrays the Employability of Older Software Developers. IEEE Software, 37(6), 26-31.
    DOI Scopus21 WoS8
    2020 Ralph, P., Baltes, S., Adisaputri, G., Torkar, R., Kovalenko, V., Kalinowski, M., . . . Alkadhi, R. (2020). Pandemic programming: How COVID-19 affects software developers and how their organizations can help.. Empir Softw Eng, 25(6), 4927-4961.
    DOI Scopus185 WoS110 Europe PMC27
    2019 Baltes, S., Dumani, L., Treude, C., & Diehl, S. (2019). The Evolution of Stack Overflow Posts: Reconstruction and Analysis. arXiv.
    2019 Baltes, S., & Diehl, S. (2019). Usage and Attribution of Stack Overflow Code Snippets in GitHub Projects. Empirical Software Engineering, 24(3), 1259-1295.
    DOI Scopus65 WoS37

  • Book Chapters
    Year Citation
    2024 Baltes, S., & Ralph, P. (2024). Teaching Literature Reviewing for Software Engineering Research. In Handbook on Teaching Empirical Software Engineering (pp. 529-555). Springer Nature Switzerland.
    DOI
    2020 Baltes, S. (2020). Software developers' work habits and expertise: Empirical studies on sketching, code plagiarism, and expertise development. In Ernst Denert Award for Software Engineering 2019 Practice Meets Foundations (pp. 47-60). Springer International Publishing.
    DOI

  • Conference Papers
    Year Citation
    2025 Chakraborty, S., & Baltes, S. (2025). Lost in Transition: The Struggle of Women Returning to Software Engineering Research after Career Breaks. In Proceedings 2025 IEEE ACM 18th International Conference on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering Chase 2025 (pp. 12-14). IEEE.
    DOI
    2025 Hyrynsalmi, S. M., Liebel, G., De Souza Santos, R., & Baltes, S. (2025). Not Real or too Soft? On the Challenges of Publishing Interdisciplinary Software Engineering Research. In Proceedings International Conference on Software Engineering (pp. 106-117). IEEE.
    DOI
    2024 Baltes, S., & Dashuber, V. (2024). Ux debt: Developers borrow while users pay. In Proceedings 2024 IEEE ACM 17th International Conference on Cooperative and Human Aspects of Software Engineering Chase 2024 (pp. 79-84). ACM.
    DOI
    2024 Berndt, A., Bach, T., & Baltes, S. (2024). Do Test and Environmental Complexity Increase Flakiness? An Empirical Study of SAP HANA. In International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (pp. 572-581). ACM.
    DOI
    2024 Berndt, A., Baltes, S., & Bach, T. (2024). Taming Timeout Flakiness: An Empirical Study of SAP HANA. In ACM International Conference Proceeding Series (pp. 69-80). Lisbon, Portugal: ACM.
    DOI Scopus1
    2023 Böhme, L., Wuttke, T., Bender, B., Teusner, R., Baltes, S., Matthies, C., & Perscheid, M. (2023). From Full-fledged ERP Systems Towards Process-centric Business Process Platforms. In 29th Annual Americas Conference on Information Systems, AMCIS 2023.
    Scopus1
    2023 Böhme, L., Beckmann, T., Baltes, S., & Hirschfeld, R. (2023). A Penny a Function: Towards Cost Transparent Cloud Programming. In T. Beckmann, R. Hirschfeld, J. P. Saenz, & M. V. Merino (Eds.), Paint 2023 Proceedings of the 2nd ACM SIGPLAN International Workshop on Programming Abstractions and Interactive Notations Tools and Environments Co Located with Splash 2023 (pp. 1-10). PORTUGAL, Cascais: ASSOC COMPUTING MACHINERY.
    DOI Scopus2
    2023 Baltes, S., Pfitzmann, B., Kowark, T., Treude, C., & Beck, F. (2023). Visually Analyzing Company-Wide Software Service Dependencies: An Industrial Case Study. In Proceedings 2023 IEEE Working Conference on Software Visualization Vissoft 2023 (pp. 23-27). IEEE.
    DOI
    2021 Liu, J., Baltes, S., Treude, C., Lo, D., Zhang, Y., & Xia, X. (2021). Characterizing search activities on stack overflow. In Proceedings of the 29th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (pp. 919-931). New York, NY, United States: Association for Computing Machinery.
    DOI Scopus13 WoS3
    2021 Cao, K., Chen, C., Baltes, S., Treude, C., & Chen, X. (2021). Automated query reformulation for efficient search based on query logs from stack overflow. In Proceedings of the 43rd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2021) (pp. 1273-1285). Madrid, Spain: IEEE.
    DOI Scopus63 WoS27
    2020 Baltes, S., & Treude, C. (2020). Code duplication on stack overflow. In Proceedings: 2020 ACM/IEEE 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering: New Ideas and Emerging Results ICSE-NIER 2020 (pp. 13-16). online: ACM.
    DOI Scopus5 WoS3
    2020 Baltes, S., & Wagner, M. (2020). An annotated dataset of stack overflow post edits. In Proceedings of the 2020 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO'20). GECCO 2020 Companion (pp. 1923-1925). online: Association for Computing Machinery.
    DOI Scopus4
    2019 Baltes, S., & Diehl, S. (2019). Towards a theory of software development expertise. In Lecture Notes in Informatics Lni Proceedings Series of the Gesellschaft Fur Informatik Gi Vol. P-292 (pp. 83-84).
    DOI
    2019 Baltes, S., Treude, C., & Diehl, S. (2019). SOTorrent: Studying the origin, evolution, and usage of stack overflow code snippets. In Proceedings of the IEEE/ACM 16th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR 2019) Vol. 2019-May (pp. 191-194). Montreal, QC, Canada: IEEE/ACM.
    DOI Scopus53
    2018 Baltes, S., Knack, J., Anastasiou, D., Tymann, R., & Diehl, S. (2018). (No) influence of continuous integration on the commit activity in GitHub projects. In O. Baysal, & T. Menzies (Eds.), Proceedings of the 4th ACM SIGSOFT International Workshop on Software Analytics (SWAN 2018) (pp. 1-7). online: Association for Computing Machinery.
    DOI Scopus7 WoS4
    2018 Baltes, S., Dumani, L., Treude, C., & Diehl, S. (2018). SOTorrent: Reconstructing and analyzing the evolution of stack overflow posts. In Proceedings of the ACM/IEEE 15th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR 2018) (pp. 319-330). Gothenburg, SWEDEN: ACM.
    DOI Scopus96 WoS65
    2018 Baltes, S., & Diehl, S. (2018). Towards a Theory of Software Development Expertise. In G. Leavens, A. Garcia, & C. Pasareanu (Eds.), 26th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE 2018) (pp. 187-200). online: ACM.
    DOI Scopus75 WoS46
    2018 Stors, N., & Baltes, S. (2018). Constructing Urban Tourism Space Digitally: A Study of Airbnb Listings in Two Berlin Neighborhoods. In Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human-Computer Interaction Vol. 2 (pp. 1-29). online: Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).
    DOI Scopus10
    2017 Baltes, S., Hollerich, F., & Diehl, S. (2017). Round-Trip Sketches: Supporting the Lifecycle of Software Development Sketches from Analog to Digital and Back. In K. Zhang, I. Beschastnikh, & A. Mocci (Eds.), 2017 IEEE Working Conference on Software Visualization (VISSOFT 2017) Vol. 2017-October (pp. 94-98). Online: IEEE.
    DOI Scopus4
    2017 Baltes, S., Kiefer, R., & Diehl, S. (2017). Attribution required: Stack overflow code snippets in GitHub projects. In S. Uchitel, A. Orso, & M. P. Robillard (Eds.), 39th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2017), Companion Volume (pp. 161-163). Online: IEEE Computer Society.
    DOI Scopus28 WoS13
    2016 Baltes, S., & Diehl, S. (2016). Worse Than Spam: Issues In Sampling Software Developers. In M. Genero, A. Jedlitschka, & M. Jorgensen (Eds.), 10th International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM 2016) Vol. 08-09-September-2016 (pp. 52:1-52:6). Online: ACM.
    DOI Scopus48 WoS28
    2016 Blascheck, T., Beck, F., Baltes, S., Ertl, T., & Weiskopf, D. (2016). Visual analysis and coding of data-rich user behavior. In G. L. Andrienko, S. Liu, & J. T. Stasko (Eds.), 2016 IEEE Conference on Visual Analytics Science and Technology (VAST 2016) (pp. 141-150). online: IEEE.
    DOI Scopus19 WoS11
    2015 Biegel, B., Baltes, S., Scarpellini, I., & Diehl, S. (2015). Code Basket: Making Developers’ Mental Model Visible and Explorable. In K. Blincoe, D. E. Damian, G. Valetto, & J. D. Herbsleb (Eds.), 2nd IEEE/ACM International Workshop on Context for Software Development (CSD 2015) (pp. 20-24). Online: IEEE Computer Society.
    DOI Scopus11 WoS9
    2015 Biegel, B., Baltes, S., Prevos, B., & Diehl, S. (2015). VisualCues: Visually explaining source code in computer science education. In Z. Li, C. Ermel, & S. D. Fleming (Eds.), 2015 IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing (VL/HCC 2015) Vol. 2015-December (pp. 89-93). online: IEEE Computer Society.
    DOI Scopus1
    2015 Baltes, S., Moseler, O., Beck, F., & Diehl, S. (2015). Navigate, Understand, Communicate: How Developers Locate Performance Bugs. In Q. Wang, G. Ruhe, J. Carver, & O. Dieste (Eds.), 9th International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM 2015) Vol. 2015-November (pp. 225-234). Beijing, China: IEEE.
    DOI Scopus20 WoS5
    2015 Baltes, S., & Diehl, S. (2015). Sketches and Diagrams in Practice. In Lecture Notes in Informatics Lni Proceedings Series of the Gesellschaft Fur Informatik Gi Vol. P-239 (pp. 69-70).
    2014 Baltes, S., Schmitz, P., & Diehl, S. (2014). Linking sketches and diagrams to source code artifacts. In S. -C. Cheung, A. Orso, & M. -A. D. Storey (Eds.), 22nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE 2014) Vol. 16-21-November-2014 (pp. 743-746). Hong Kong, China: ACM.
    DOI Scopus17 WoS10
    2014 Beck, F., Gulan, S., Biegel, B., Baltes, S., & Weiskopf, D. (2014). RegViz: Visual debugging of regular expressions. In P. Jalote, L. C. Briand, & A. van der Hoek (Eds.), 36th International Conference on Software Engineering Companion (ICSE 2014) (pp. 504-507). Online: ACM.
    DOI Scopus23 WoS18
    2014 Baltes, S., & Diehl, S. (2014). Sketches and diagrams in practice. In S. -C. Cheung, A. Orso, & M. -A. D. Storey (Eds.), 22nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE 2014) Vol. 16-21-November-2014 (pp. 530-541). Hong Kong, China: ACM.
    DOI Scopus62 WoS29

  • Conference Items
    Year Citation
    2016 Baltes, S., & Wagner, S. (2016). Effects of Sketching on Program Comprehension (Research Plan). Poster session presented at the meeting of Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Agile Processes in Software Engineering and Extreme Programming (XP 2016). Edinburgh, UK: Springer.
    DOI

  • Preprint
    Year Citation
    2025 Torres, A., Baltes, S., Treude, C., & Wagner, M. (2025). Information-Theoretic Detection of Unusual Source Code Changes.
    2025 Baltes, S., Speith, T., Chiteri, B., Mohsenimofidi, S., Chakraborty, S., & Buschek, D. (2025). Rethinking Trust in AI Assistants for Software Development: A Critical
    Review.
    2025 Wyrich, M., Tinnes, C., Baltes, S., & Apel, S. (2025). The Silent Scientist: When Software Research Fails to Reach Its Audience.
    2025 Hyrynsalmi, S. M., Liebel, G., Santos, R. D. S., & Baltes, S. (2025). Not real or too soft? On the challenges of publishing interdisciplinary
    software engineering research.
    2024 Hyrynsalmi, S. M., Baltes, S., Brown, C., Prikladnicki, R., Rodriguez-Perez, G., Serebrenik, A., . . . Liebel, G. (2024). Making Software Development More Diverse and Inclusive: Key Themes,
    Challenges, and Future Directions.
    2024 Berndt, A., Bach, T., & Baltes, S. (2024). Do Test and Environmental Complexity Increase Flakiness? An Empirical
    Study of SAP HANA.
    2024 Wagner, S., Barón, M. M., Falessi, D., & Baltes, S. (2024). Towards Evaluation Guidelines for Empirical Studies involving LLMs.
    2024 Baltes, S., & Ralph, P. (2024). Teaching Literature Reviewing for Software Engineering Research.

Awards and grants are listed in my CV.

A full list of my teaching activities can be found on my personal website.

  • Past Higher Degree by Research Supervision (University of Adelaide)
    Date Role Research Topic Program Degree Type Student Load Student Name
    2022 - 2024 Co-Supervisor Applying Information Theory to Software Evolution: What can we Learn From Surprising Changes? Master of Philosophy Master Full Time Mr Adriano Rodrigues Figueiredo Torres
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