Publications

Journal articles, conference papers and posters, etc.

Please also note the list of books (on the right hand side column) and the list of theses.

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2026

  • Debugging Cyber-Physical Systems: The Impact of Anchoring Strategies and Degree of Virtuality of Debugging Visualizations
    Nico Feld , Lucas Kreber ,Jan Niclas Ruppenthal, Michael Feldmann ,Stephan Diehl, and Benjamin Weyers
    conditionally accepted for ISMAR 2026 / TVCG
  • An Empirical Study on Hypertext Navigation in Augmented Reality 
    Lucas Kreber, Jan Niclas Ruppenthal, and Stephan, Diehl
    in Proceedings of 12th Conference on Virtual Reality (ICVR 2026), Cardiff, UK, July 28-30, 2026.
  • A Comparative Study of Dual-Monitor and Augmented-Reality Interfaces for Digital-Twin-Based Debugging
    Lucas Kreber, Nico Feld, Stephan, Diehl, and Benjamin Weyers
    in Proceedings of 34th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC 2026), IEEE, April 2026. [see publisher site: doi.acm.org?doi=3794763.3794814]

2025

  • A Retrospective on Mining Version Histories to Guide Software Changes
    Thomas Zimmermann, Peter Weißgerber, Stephan Diehl, and Andreas Zeller
    in IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, IEEE, Januar 2025 [see publisher site: doi:10.1109/TSE.2025.3533559]

2023

  • A Comparative Evaluation of Tabs and Linked Panels for Program Understanding in Augmented Reality
    Lucas Kreber and Stephan Diehl
    in Proceedings of the IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR 2023), Sydney, Australia, October 16-20, 2023. [see publisher site: https://doi.org/10.1109/ISMAR59233.2023.00017]
  • The CodeSparks Framework – Augmenting Source Code with Glyph-based Visualizations
    Oliver Moseler and Stephan Diehl
    in Science of Computer Programming, volume 230, Elsevier, 2023. [See publisher site: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scico.2023.102998]

2022

  • IDEVELOPAR: A Programming Interface to enhance Code Understanding in Augmented Reality
    Lucas Kreber, Stephan Diehl, and Patrick Weil
    in Proceedings of the 10th IEEE Working Conference on Software Visualization (VISSOFT 2022), Limassol, Cyprus, October 02-03, 2022. [Accepted version, see publisher site: https://doi.org/10.1109/VISSOFT55257.2022.00017]
  • The ThreadRadar Visualization for Debugging Concurrent Java Programs
    Oliver Moseler, Lucas Kreber, and Stephan Diehl
    in Journal of Visualization (Open Access), volume 25, Springer, 2022. (Extended version of ThreadRadar: A Thread-Aware Visualization for Debugging Concurrent Java Programs) [Version of Record, see publisher site: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12650-022-00843-w]

2021

  • ThreadRadar: A Thread-Aware Visualization for Debugging Concurrent Java Programs
    Oliver Moseler, Lucas Kreber, and Stephan Diehl
    in Proceedings of the 14th International Symposium on Visual Information Communication and Interaction (VINCI 2021), Potsdam, Germany, 6–8 September 2021 (This paper received the Best Paper Award). [Accepted Version, see publisher site: https://doi.org/10.1145/3481549.3481566]
  • 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
    in Journal of Systems and Software, Elsevier, volume 172, February 2021. [preprint on arXiv, see publisher site:
    https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2020.110863]

2020

2019

  • Usage and Attribution of Stack Overflow Code Snippets in GitHub Projects.
    Sebastian Baltes and Stephan Diehl.
    in Empirical Software Engineering, Springer, volume 24, pages 1259-1295, 2019. [see publisher's site: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10664-018-9650-5], [preprint]
  • Exploring the limits of complexity: A survey of empirical studies on graph visualisation
    Vahan Yoghourdjian, Daniel Archambault, Stephan Diehl, Tim Dwyer, Karsten Klein, Helen C. Purchase, and Hsiang-Yun Wu
    in Visual Informatics, Elsevier, 2019. [see publisher's site]

2018

  • Towards a Theory of Software Development Expertise
    Sebastian Baltes and Stephan Diehl
    in Proceedings of the 26th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE 2018), Lake Buena Vista, Florida, Nov 4-9, 2018. [preprint, see publisher site: https://doi.org/10.1145/3236024.3236061, supplemental material available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.1299798]
  • SOTorrent: Reconstructing and Analyzing the Evolution of Stack Overflow Posts
    Sebastian Baltes, Lorik Dumani, Christoph Treude, and Stephan Diehl
    in Proceedings of the 15th Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR 2018), Gothenburg, Sweden, May 2018. [preprint, see publisher site: https://doi.org/10.1145/3196398.3196430]
  • (No) Influence of Continuous Integration on the Commit Activity in GitHub Projects.
    Sebastian Baltes, Jascha Knack, Daniel Anastasiou, Ralf Tymann, and Stephan Diehl.
    4th International Workshop on Software Analytics (SWAN 2018), Lake Buena Vista, Florida, USA, Nov 5, 2018.(This paper received the Best Paper Award). [preprint, see publisher site: https://doi.org/10.1145/3278142.3278143]

2017

  • Crowdsourcing for Information Visualization: Promises and Pitfalls
    Rita Borgo, Bongshin Lee, Sara Fabrikant, Radu Jianu, Andreas Kerren, Stephen Kobourov, Fintan McGee, Luana Micallef, Tatiana von Landesberger, Katrin Ballweg, Stephan Diehl, Paolo Simonetto, and Michelle Zhou
     in Evaluation in the Crowd. Crowdsourcing and Human-Centered Experiments (Book Chapter), Springer LNCS 10264, 2017. (see publisher's site)
  • Round-Trip Sketches: Supporting the Lifecycle of Software Development Sketches from Analog to Digital and Back (NIER Track)
    Sebastian Baltes, Fabrice Hollerich and Stephan Diehl
    in Proceedings of IEEE Working Conference on Software Visualization (VISSOFT 2017), Shanghai, China, September 2017. [preprint, see publisher site: https://doi.org/10.1109/VISSOFT.2017.24]
  • A Taxonomy and Survey on Dynamic Graph Visualization
    Fabian Beck, Michael Burch, Stephan Diehl and Daniel Weiskopf
    In Computer Graphics Forum, 36(1): 133-159, 2017 [https://doi.org/10.1111/cgf.12791]
  • Attribution Required: Stack Overflow Code Snippets in GitHub Projects
    Sebastian Baltes, Richard Kiefer, and Stephan Diehl
    Poster Abstract, Proceedings of the 39th International Conference on Software Engineering Companion (ICSE 2017) [preprint, see publisher site: https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSE-C.2017.99]

2016

  • Worse Than Spam: Issues In Sampling Software Developers
    Sebastian Baltes and Stephan Diehl
    in Proceedings of 10th International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM'16). [Preprint, publisher site: https://doi.org/10.1145/2961111.2962628]
  • Make Visualization Part of your Analysis Process
    Stephan Diehl
    in Perspectives on Data Science for Software Engineering (Book Chapter), Morgan Kaufmann, T. Menzies, L. Williams, and T. Zimmermann (Eds.), Jul 2016. [see publisher site: https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-804206-9.00048-9]

2015

  • Grounded Requirements Engineering: An Approach to Use Case Driven Requirements Engineering
    David Würfel, Rainer Lutz, and Stephan Diehl 
    in Journal of Systems and Software, Elsevier, Volume 117, July 2016. [see publisher site: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2015.10.024] [preprint]
  • Past, Present, and Future of and in Software Visualization
    Stephan Diehl
    in Computer Vision, Imaging and Computer Graphics - Theory and Applications, Springer CCIS 550 (Communications in Computer and Information Science), Springer, pp 3-11, 2015. [see book at publisher site]
  • VisualCues: Visually Explaining Source Code in Computer Science Education
    Benjamin Biegel, Sebastian Baltes, Bob Prevos and Stephan Diehl
    in Proceedings of IEEE Symposium on Visual Languages and Human-Centric Computing, Atlanta, Georgia, USA, October, 2015. [preprint, see publisher site: https://doi.org/10.1109/VLHCC.2015.7357202].
  • Navigate, Understand, Communicate: How Developers Locate Performance Bugs
    Sebastian Baltes, Oliver Moseler, Fabian Beck, and Stephan Diehl
    in Proceedings of 9th International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM'15), Beijing, China, October, 2015. [preprint, see publisher site: https://doi.org/10.1109/ESEM.2015.7321208]
  • Live Object Exploration: Observing and Manipulating Behavior and State of Java Objects
    Benjamin Biegel, Benedikt Lesch and Stephan Diehl
    In Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution ICSME (ERA Track), Bremen, Sept. 29- Oct. 1, 2015. [preprint, see publisher site: https://doi.org/10.1109/ICSM.2015.7332518].
  • CodeBasket: Making Developers' Mental Model Visible and Explorable
    Benjamin Biegel, Sebastian Baltes, Ivan Scarpellini and Stephan Diehl
    in Proceedings of 2nd Workshop on Context for Software Development (CSD 2015), Florence, Italy, May, 2015. [preprint, see publisher site: https://doi.org/10.1109/CSD.2015.12].

2014

  • Sketches and Diagrams in Practice
    Sebastian Baltes and Stephan Diehl
    in Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE 2014), Hong Kong, China, November 16-22, 2014 [PDF, see publisher site: https://doi.org/10.1145/2635868.2635891].
  • Linking sketches and diagrams to source code artifacts
    Sebastian Baltes, Peter Schmitz and Stephan Diehl
    in Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE 2014), Hong Kong, China, November 16-22, 2014 [see publisher site: https://doi.org/10.1145/2635868.2661672].
  • Using Visual Dataflow Programming for Interactive Model Comparison
    Rainer Lutz and Stephan Diehl
    in Proceedings of  29th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2014), Västerås, Sweden, September 15- 19, 2014  [PDF, see publisher site: https://doi.org/10.1145/2642937.2642984].
  • Code Tagging as a Social Game
    Benjamin Biegel, Fabian Beck, Benedikt Lesch and Stephan Diehl
    In Proceedings of the 30th International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution ICSME (ERA Track), Victoria C