About me

I'm a PhD candidate doing research on the conduct of reliable and valid code comprehension experiments. I love doing research with and for humans, that's why my work is often at the intersection between psychology and empirical software engineering. Since I believe that research doesn't end with the publication of a paper and that research papers are not necessarily written for non-scientists, I seek to empower researchers in my field to explore the possibilities of science communication. Oh, and I love sports, especially table tennis 🏓 and running 🏃.

Highlighted projects

• Research • May 23–29, 2021
  The Mind is a Powerful Place: How Showing Code Comprehensibility Metrics Influences Code Understanding
  We had the chance to present our latest research at the 43th International Conference on Software Engineering. In a controlled experiment, we showed how easily developers can be anchored in their subjective evaluation of code comprehensibility. They first had to understand a code snippet and then rate its comprehensibility. In the end, their evaluation depended heavily on what a made-up comprehensibility metric displayed next to the code indicated to them. Find the free version of our paper on arXiv and a recording of my presentation on YouTube. My co-author Daniel Graziotin also wrote a short blog post about our work.
• Development • 2013–2016
  WissenA5: A platform for summarizing general knowledge
  Together with friends, I launched the German-language website WissenA5. Sometimes you only need a short introduction to a topic, accordingly anyone can create summaries here, but has no more space for it than a DIN A5 paper. We made it into two newspapers and regional television. More than 30 active users have contributed knowledge.
• Research & Development • since 2018
  Me and the (refactoring-)bots
  Since the founding of an international workshop on bots in software engineering (BotSE) in 2018/2019, I have been an enthusiastic member of this research community. Among other things, I have published several papers on human-bot interaction and implemented a refactoring bot that automatically creates pull requests to fix code smells.

Awards

I'm proud of a couple of awards that confirm that I not only enjoy what I do, but that good stuff usually comes out of it. In 2016, I won the Fujitsu Next Agile IT Award for my bachelor thesis on capturing and summarizing activities in a Scrum team. In 2020, we won the best paper award at the ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM) for the validation of a code comprehensibility metric that is already being used in practice through its integration with SonarQube. In 2022, I won three awards at the ACM/IEEE International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC): distinguished paper, distinguished reviewer, and best presentation award.

Selected publications

• Evidence Profiles for Validity Threats in Program Comprehension Experiments M. Muñoz Barón, M. Wyrich, D. Graziotin, S. Wagner•ICSE 2023
• Teaching Computer Science Students to Communicate Scientific Findings More Effectively M. Wyrich, S. Wagner•ICSE 2023
• The Mind Is a Powerful Place: How Showing Code Comprehensibility Metrics Influences Code Understanding M. Wyrich, A. Preikschat, D. Graziotin, S. Wagner•ICSE 2021
• Résumé-Driven Development: A Definition and Empirical Characterization J. Fritzsch, M. Wyrich, J. Bogner, S. Wagner•ICSE 2021
• Code Comprehension Confounders: A Study of Intelligence and Personality S. Wagner, M. Wyrich•IEEE TSE (2021)
• Anchoring Code Understandability Evaluations Through Task Descriptions M. Wyrich, L. Merz, D. Graziotin•ICPC 2022
• An Empirical Validation of Cognitive Complexity as a Measure of Source Code Understandability M. Muñoz Barón, M. Wyrich, S. Wagner•ESEM 2020
• A theory on individual characteristics of successful coding challenge solvers M. Wyrich, D. Graziotin, S. Wagner•PeerJ CS (2019)