PhD in Informatics, MSc in Psychology
Hello, I'm Pavlína!
I am a psychologist doing software engineering research. I hold a PhD in Informatics from the University of Zurich and I am currently a postdoctoral researcher at INESC TEC in Porto, Portugal, in the Centre for Human-Centred Computing and Information Science.
My research examines the work process and the human factors in Code Review. I am particularly interested in what happens on the side of the author and the reviewer: the cognitive load of reading and understanding a change, the strategies reviewers actually use, personality and communication patterns, interpersonal conflicts, the working environment, and the organisational infrastructure and management around it. My PhD thesis, Human-Centric Code Review, brought these threads together.
I am from the Czech Republic. I completed my PhD in Informatics under Prof. Alberto Bacchelli at ZEST in Zurich, and I now work as a postdoctoral researcher at INESC TEC.
I studied and worked in following universities:
2025 - now Postdoctoral Researcher - INESC TEC, Portugal
2018 - 2025 PhD in Informatics - Institute for Informatics, University of Zurich, Switzerland
2016 Erasmus+ - School of Psychology, Queen's University Belfast, United Kingdom
2011 - 2017 BSc and MSc in Psychology - Faculty of Social Studies, Masaryk University, Czech Republic
Even though my education is focused on Work and Organizational Psychology, as a Research Assistant at the Department of Psychology, I grew close to examining the role of ICT in human life.
As a research assistant, I worked on topics like:
As a psychologist, I worked and interned in various contexts, for example:
A full list is on my Google Scholar profile.
Can an LLM Detect Instances of Microservice Infrastructure Patterns? (2026) In 23rd IEEE International Conference on Software Architecture (ICSA 2026). Duarte, C. E., Harrison, N. B., Correia, F. F., Aguiar, A., & Gonçalves, P.
The Value of Effective Pull Request Description (2026) In 23rd International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR 2026). Pirouzkhah, S., Wurzel Gonçalves, P., & Bacchelli, A.
Code Review Comprehension: Reviewing Strategies Seen Through Code Comprehension Theories (2025) In 33rd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC 2025). Wurzel Gonçalves, P., Rani, P., Storey, M.-A., Spinellis, D., & Bacchelli, A.
Human-Centric Code Review (2025) PhD dissertation, University of Zurich. Wurzel Gonçalves, P.
Constructive Code Review: Managing the Impact of Interpersonal Conflicts in Practice (2024) In 46th International Conference on Software Engineering, Software Engineering in Practice track (ICSE-SEIP 2024). Wurzel Gonçalves, P., Gonçalves, J. S. V., & Bacchelli, A.
Competencies for Code Review (2023) In Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 7 (CSCW1). Wurzel Gonçalves, P., Çalikli, G., Serebrenik, A., & Bacchelli, A.
Do Explicit Review Strategies Improve Code Review Performance? Towards Understanding the Role of Cognitive Load (2022) In Empirical Software Engineering, 27 (4). Wurzel Gonçalves, P., Fregnan, E., Baum, T., Schneider, K., & Bacchelli, A.
Interpersonal Conflicts During Code Review: Developers' Experience and Practices (2022) In Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction, 6 (CSCW1). Wurzel Gonçalves, P., Çalikli, G., & Bacchelli, A.
Do Explicit Review Strategies Improve Code Review Performance? (2020) In Registered Reports Track at MSR2020. Wurzel Gonçalves, P., Fregnan, E., Baum, T., Schneider, K., & Bacchelli, A.
Characterizing women (not) contributing to open-source. (2019) In 2nd International Workshop on Gender Equality in Software Engineering at ICSE2019. Wurzelová, P., Palomba, F., & Bacchelli, A.
I take interest in many things because the world is great! I like hikes in the nature, travelling, orienteering or crochet. But mostly, I love music. I play clarinet, saxophone and flute pretty well. Guitar and piano I play pretty bad, but with a great passion!
I spent a great deal singing in the Czech Academic Choir (check them out) and I am one of the founders of a vocal group Illegato (they are amazing and most importantly, very kind people).