Rodrigo Bonifacio

I am an associate professor at the Informatics Center, Federal University of Pernambuco, and a member of both the academic and professional graduate programs of the Computer Science Department at the University of Brasília, where I worked from March 2011 to December 2025.
From August 2018 to July 2019, I was a visiting researcher at the University of Paderborn, working under the supervision of Prof. Eric Bodden.

My research focuses on software maintenance and program analysis and manipulation, with the goal of identifying and fixing bugs and vulnerabilities, as well as understanding how programming language features are used in practice.

I hold B.S. and M.S. degrees in Computer Science from the Federal University of Paraíba, earned in João Pessoa and Campina Grande, respectively, and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the Federal University of Pernambuco, in Recife.

(last update: December, 2025)

Former PhD students

• Francisco Handrick da Costa: mining Android sandboxes for malware detection

• Marcos Oliveira: refactoring recommendation using co-change dependencies

Current PhD Students

• Luiz Amaral (PhD student, former MSc student): practical use of static analysis tools for vulnerability detection

• Walter Lucas (PhD student, former MSc student): source code modernization

• Pedro Henrique Teixeira Costa (PhD student, former MSc student): integration of Android test-generation tools and runtime-verification

Service

I have been invited to review papers for the following journals and magazines

• IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering
• Journal of Empirical Software Engineering
• Journal of Systems and Software
• Information and Software Technology
• Journal of Brazilian Computer Society

Selected Publications

• Walter Lucas, Rafael Campos Nunes, Rodrigo Bonifácio, Fausto Carvalho, Ricardo Lima, Michael Silva, Adriano Torres, Paola R. G. Accioly, Eduardo Monteiro, João Saraiva: Understanding the adoption of modern Javascript features: An empirical study on open-source systems. Empir. Softw. Eng. 30(3): 107 (2025)

• Francisco Handrick da Costa, Ismael Medeiros, Leandro Oliveira, João Calássio, Rodrigo Bonifácio, Krishna Narasimhan, Mira Mezini, Márcio Ribeiro: Scaling Up: Revisiting Mining Android Sandboxes at Scale for Malware Classification (Replication Paper). ECOOP 2025: 40:1-40:26

• Walter Lucas, Fausto Carvalho, Rafael Campos Nunes, Rodrigo Bonifácio, João Saraiva, Paola R. G. Accioly: Embracing modern C++ features: An empirical assessment on the KDE community. J. Softw. Evol. Process. 36(5) (2024)

• Pedro V. R. de Carvalho, Rodrigo Bonifácio, Walter Lucas, Alana Paula Barbosa Mota: Mining Discussions on Software Migration: A study of the Boost mailing list regarding C++ code evolution. SBQS 2024: 264-274

• Adriano Torres, Pedro Henrique Teixeira Costa, Luis Henrique Vieira Amaral, Jonata Pastro, Rodrigo Bonifácio, Marcelo d’Amorim, Owolabi Legunsen, Eric Bodden, Edna Dias Canedo: Runtime Verification of Crypto APIs: An Empirical Study. IEEE Trans. Software Eng. 49(10): 4510-4525 (2023)

• Adriano Torres, Caio Oliveira, Márcio Vinicius Okimoto, Diego Marcilio, Pedro Queiroga, Fernando Castor, Rodrigo Bonifácio, Edna Dias Canedo, Márcio Ribeiro, Eduardo Monteiro: An Investigation of confusing code patterns in JavaScript. J. Syst. Softw. 203: 111731 (2023)

• Walter Lucas, Rodrigo Bonifácio, João Saraiva: Understanding the Motivations, Challenges, and Practices of Software Rejuvenation. ICSME 2023: 611-616

• Francisco Handrick da Costa, Ismael Medeiros, Thales Menezes, João Victor da Silva, Ingrid Lorraine da Silva, Rodrigo Bonifácio, Krishna Narasimhan, Márcio Ribeiro: Exploring the use of static and dynamic analysis to improve the performance of the mining sandbox approach for android malware identification. J. Syst. Softw. 183: 111092 (2022)

• Rodrigo Bonifácio and Stefan Krüger and Krishna Narasimhan and Eric Bodden and Mira Mezini. Dealing with Variability in API Misuse Specification. 35th European Conference on Object Oriented Programming (ECOOP 2021).

• Marcos Medeiros and Uirá Kulesza and Rodrigo Bonifácio and Eiji Adachi Barbosa and Roberta Coelho. Improving Bug Localization by Mining Crash Reports: An Industrial Study. IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution, ICSME 2020, Adelaide, Australia, September 28 - October 2, 2020.

• Luis Henrique Vieira Amaral and Marcos C. Oliveira and Welder Pinheiro Luz and José Fortes and Rodrigo Bonifácio and Daniel Alencar and Eduardo Monteiro and Gustavo Pinto and David Lo. How (Not) to Find Bugs: The Interplay Between Merge Conflicts, Co-Changes, and Bugs. IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution, ICSME 2020, Adelaide, Australia, September 28 - October 2, 2020.

• Diego Marcilio and Carlo A. Furia and Rodrigo Bonifácio and Gustavo Pinto. SpongeBugs: Automatically generating fix suggestions in response to static code analysis warnings. J. Syst. Softw.. 2020’

• Edna Dias Canedo and Rodrigo Bonifácio and Márcio Vinicius Okimoto and Alexander Serebrenik and Gustavo Pinto and Eduardo Monteiro. Work Practices and Perceptions from Women Core Developers in OSS Communities. ESEM ‘20: ACM / IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement, Bari, Italy, October 5-7, 2020.

• Antonio Carvalho, Welder Pinheiro Luz, Diego Marcilio, Rodrigo Bonifácio, Gustavo Pinto, Edna Dias Canedo. C-3PR: A Bot for Fixing Static Analysis Violations via Pull Requests. 27th SANER (CSMR-WCRE) 2020: London, ON, Canada.

• Welder Pinheiro Luz and Gustavo Pinto and Rodrigo Bonifácio. Adopting DevOps in the real world: A theory, a model, and a case study. J. Syst. Software. 2019. JSS 2019’s Paper of the Year

• Marcos César de Oliveira and Davi Freitas and Rodrigo Bonifácio and Gustavo Pinto and David Lo. Finding needles in a haystack: Leveraging co-change dependencies to recommend refactorings. J. Syst. Software. 2019

• Diego Marcilio and Rodrigo Bonifácio and Eduardo Monteiro and Edna Dias Canedo and Welder Pinheiro Luz and Gustavo Pinto. Are static analysis violations really fixed?: a closer look at realistic usage of SonarQube. Proceedings of the 27th International Conference on Program Comprehension, ICPC 2019, Montreal, QC, Canada, May 25-31, 2019. 2019

• Diego Marcilio and Carlo A. Furia and Rodrigo Bonifácio and Gustavo Pinto. Automatically Generating Fix Suggestions in Response to Static Code Analysis Warnings. 19th International Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation, SCAM 2019, Cleveland, OH, USA, September 30 - October 1, 2019. 2019

• Walter Lucas and Rodrigo Bonifácio and Edna Dias Canedo and Diego Marcilio and Fernanda Lima. Does the Introduction of Lambda Expressions Improve the Comprehension of Java Programs?. Proceedings of the XXXIII Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering, SBES 2019, Salvador, Brazil, September 23-27, 2019. 2019. Awarded best paper of the conference.

• Luiz Carvalho and Alessandro Garcia and Wesley K. G. Assunção and Rodrigo Bonifácio and Leonardo P. Tizzei and Thelma Elita Colanzi. Extraction of configurable and reusable microservices from legacy systems: an exploratory study. Proceedings of the 23rd International Systems and Software Product Line Conference, SPLC 2019, Volume A, Paris, France, September 9-13, 2019. 2019

• Pinto, Gustavo and Castor, Fernando and Bonifacio, Rodrigo and Rebouças, Marcel. Work practices and challenges in continuous integration: A survey with Travis CI users. Software: Practice and Experience. 2018

• Welder Pinheiro Luz and Gustavo Pinto and Rodrigo Bonifácio. Building a collaborative culture: a grounded theory of well succeeded devops adoption in practice. Proceedings of the 12th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement, ESEM 2018, Oulu, Finland, October 11-12, 2018. . Distinguished Paper Award

• Reno Dantas and Antonio Carvalho and Diego Marcilio and Luisa Fantin and Uriel Silva and Walter Lucas and Rodrigo Bonifácio. Reconciling the past and the present: An empirical study on the application of source code transformations to automatically rejuvenate Java programs. 25th International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering, SANER 2018, Campobasso, Italy, March 20-23, 2018. 2018

• Malaquias, Romero and Ribeiro, Márcio and Bonifácio, Rodrigo and Monteiro, Eduardo and Medeiros, Flávio and Garcia, Alessandro and Gheyi, Rohit. The Discipline of Preprocessor-based Annotations Does #Ifdef TAG N’T #Endif Matter. Proceedings of the 25th International Conference on Program Comprehension. 2017

• Sena, Demóstenes and Coelho, Roberta and Kulesza, Uirá and Bonifácio, Rodrigo. Understanding the Exception Handling Strategies of Java Libraries: An Empirical Study. Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories. 2016

• de Oliveira, Marcos César and Bonifácio, Rodrigo and Ramos, Guilherme N. and Ribeiro, Márcio. Unveiling and Reasoning About Co-change Dependencies. Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Modularity. 2016

• Marcos César de Oliveira and Rodrigo Bonifácio and Guilherme Novaes Ramos and Márcio de Medeiros Ribeiro. On the Conceptual Cohesion of Co-Change Clusters. Proceedings of the 29th Brazilian Software Engineering Symposium. 2015

• Rodrigo Bonifácio and Fausto Carvalho and Guilherme Ramos and Uirá Kulesza and Roberta Coelho. The Use of C++ Exception Handling Constructs: A Comprehensive Study. Proceedings of the 15th IEEE International Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation. 2015. Distinguished Paper Award

• Bonifácio, Rodrigo and Borba, Paulo and Ferraz, Cristiano and Accioly, Paola. Empirical assessment of two approaches for specifying software product line use case scenarios. Software & Systems Modeling. 2015

• Alférez, Mauricio and Bonifácio, Rodrigo and Teixeira, Leopoldo and Accioly, Paola and Kulesza, Uirá and Moreira, Ana and Araujo, Joao and Borba, Paulo. Evaluating scenario-based SPL requirements approaches: the case for modularity, stability and expressiveness. Requirements Engineering. 2014

• Costa Neto, Alberto and Bonifácio, Rodrigo and Ribeiro, Márcio and Pontual, Carlos Eduardo and Borba, Paulo and Castor, Fernando. A Design Rule Language for Aspect-oriented Programming. J. Syst. Softw.. 2013

• Bonifácio, Rodrigo and Borba, Paulo. Modeling Scenario Variability As Crosscutting Mechanisms. Proceedings of the 8th ACM International Conference on Aspect-oriented Software Development. 2009

Social

	github
	google scholar
	DBLP