Rate My Professor Kelly Blincoe

Associate Professor Kelly Blincoe is an Associate Professor of Software Engineering in the Department of Electrical, Computer, and Software Engineering within the Faculty of Engineering at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, where she leads the Human Aspects of Software Engineering Lab (HASEL). She earned her PhD from Drexel University in 2014 with a dissertation on methods to facilitate timely and efficient coordination between software developers, an MS in Information Science from Pennsylvania State University in 2008, and a BE from Villanova University in 2004. Her career includes previous roles as a lecturer at Auckland University of Technology, a postdoctoral fellow in the Software Engineering Global interAction Lab at the University of Victoria, Canada, and eight years as a software engineer and proposal manager at Lockheed Martin.

Blincoe's research examines human and social aspects of software engineering from a socio-technical perspective, including automated updates of software dependencies to mitigate security vulnerabilities and breaking changes, diversity and inclusion for software developers with a focus on retention barriers and inclusive practices, and automated software requirements analytics from user feedback in app stores, social media, and forums. She is a Rutherford Discovery Fellow supported by Royal Society Te Apārangi, with additional funding from the Marsden Fund Fast-Start grant, National Science Challenges Science for Technological Innovation Veracity Spearhead, and a 2019 Google Faculty Research Award. Blincoe edited the book Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion in Software Engineering: Best Practices and Insights published by Apress in 2024. Notable publications include Accessibility Rank: A Machine Learning Approach for Prioritizing Accessibility User Feedback (Empirical Software Engineering, 2025), Understanding the Impact of APIs Behavioral Breaking Changes on Client Applications (Proceedings of the ACM on Software Engineering, 2024), Evaluating Software User Feedback Classifier Performance on Unseen Apps, Datasets, and Metadata (Empirical Software Engineering, 2023), and The Promises and Perils of Mining GitHub (2014). In 2024, she received the Most Influential Paper Award at the Mining Software Repositories conference for her 2014 paper.