About
I'm a full professor in software engineering at the Delft University of Technology, The Netherlands. My research interests are in software evolution and software testing. I received my MSc (2002) and PhD (2006) from the University of Antwerp, Belgium, where I worked under the supervision of prof. dr. Serge Demeyer. In October 2006 I joined the Delft University of Technology as a post-doc to work together with prof. dr. Arie van Deursen. Later on I became an assistant/associate professor in the Software Engineering Research Group (SERG) of Delft University of Technology. For the academic year 2007-2008 I was associated with the University of Antwerp as a part-time lecturer and I've taught the System Reengineering course at the University of Leicester (UK) from 2008 till 2010. In 2013 I was the recipient of an NWO Vidi career grant for my TestRoots research proposal. In 2019, NWO awarded me with their most prestigious Vici career grant. I am teaching basic programming, software testing and software reengineering.
I am the co-lead of the CSE Teaching Team.
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Key news
[06/2022] I'm hiring 1 post-doc in the area of software testing for my NWO Vici project "TestShift". See here for details. Consider applying!
[24/06/2022] I've given my inaugural lecture "Software Quality: A Blessing or a Curse?". You can see it here.
[04/2022] My former PhD student Pouria Derakhshanfar wins the VERSEN PhD Award 2021. Congrats Pouria!
[01/2022] Our paper "Evaluating the Lifespan of Code Smells using Software Repository Mining" receives the Most Influential Paper award at SANER 2022!
[03/2020] My former PhD student Moritz Beller wins the VERSEN PhD Award 2019. Congrats Moritz!
[07/2019] I was appointed full professor in software quality.
[07/2019] My former PhD student Moritz Beller wins the IPA Best Dissertation Award. Congrats Moritz!
[04/2019] Excited to join the editorial board of the Empirical Software Engineering journal!
[26/02/2019] I was awarded a 1.5M euro NWO Vici grant (13% acceptance rate), the most prestigious Dutch individual research grant, for my TestShift proposal.
[23/11/2018] Moritz Beller graduates cum laude as the 1st PhD student of which I am officially promotor. Congratulations Moritz!
[06/2017] I was elected "Best CS Teacher" 2017 at the faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science (Delft University of Technology). Thank you all (TA, co-teacher, ...) who helped me!
[02/2015] I've presented "Making Testing Fun" at TEDxDelft on February 27th, 2015! Watch it here
[06/2014] I was appointed associate professor.
[15/05/2013] I was awarded a 800K euro NWO Vidi grant, one of the most prestigious Dutch individual research grants, for my TestRoots proposal.
Team
I've had / am having the privilege of (co)supervising the following PhD students, post-docs & scientific programmers:
PhD students:
- Bas Cornelissen, graduated June 23rd, 2009. Evaluating Dynamic Analysis Techniques for Program Comprehension [PhD thesis, NWO Reconstructor project, DBLP, LinkedIn]
- Cor-Paul Bezemer, graduated April 14th, 2014. Performance Optimization of Multi-Tenant Software Systems [PhD thesis, MTS project sponsored by Exact, homepage, DBLP, LinkedIn].
- Tiago Espinha, graduated March 20th, 2015. Web Service Growing Pains: Understanding Services and Their Clients [PhD thesis, NWO ScaleItUp project, homepage, DBLP, LinkedIn].
- Cuiting Chen, graduated May 27th, 2015. Automated Fault Localization for Service-Oriented Software Systems [PhD thesis, NWO ScaleItUp project, homepage, DBLP, LinkedIn].
- Frens Vonken, worked on software quality in the EQuA project. [quit the PhD program, DBLP, LinkedIn]
- Petra Heck, graduated March 11th, 2016. Quality of Just-in-Time Requirements: Just-Enough and Just-in-Time. [PhD thesis, EQuA project, homepage, DBLP, LinkedIn].
- Moritz Beller, graduated cum laude on November 23rd, 2018. An Empirical Evaluation of Feedback-Driven Software Development [PhD thesis, TestRoots project, homepage, DBLP, LinkedIn]
- Qianqian Zhu, graduated on June 24th, 2020. The application perspective of mutation testing. [PhD thesis, TestRoots project, homepage, DBLP, LinkedIn]
- Pouria Derakhshanfar, graduated on April 22nd, 2021. Carving Information Sources to Drive Search-Based Crash Reproduction and Test Case Generation [PhD thesis, STAMP project, homepage, DBLP, LinkedIn]
- Omar Elazhary, graduated on November 8th, 2021. Exploring the socio-technical impact of continuous integration: tools, practices, and humans. (co-supervisor, main supervisors: Margaret-Anne Storey and Neil Ernst (University of Victoria, BC, Canada). [PhD Thesis, homepage, DBLP]
- Jasper Denkers, working on applying DSLs in industry (other promotors: Eelco Visser and Jurgen Vinju) [homepage, DBLP, LinkedIn]
- Carolin Brandt, working on software testing in the TestShift project [homepage, DBLP, LinkedIn]. Supervised together with Arie van Deursen.
- Ali Khatami, working on software testing in the TestShift project [homepage, DBLP, LinkedIn]. Supervised together with Sebastian Proksch.
- Imara van Dinten, working in the COSMOS project [homepage, DBLP, LinkedIn]. Supervised together with Annibale Panichella.
- Mark Swillus, working on software testing [homepage, DBLP, LinkedIn]. Supervised together with Annibale Panichella.
- Amirhossein Deljouyi, working in the TestShift project [homepage, DBLP, LinkedIn]. Supervised together with Thomas Durieux.
- Bariş Ardiç, working on software testing. [homepage, DBLP, LinkedIn]. Supervised together with Maurício Aniche.
- Bohdan Liesnikov, working on Dependently Typed Programming Languages. [homepage, DBLP, LinkedIn]. Supervised by Jesper Cockx.
- Daniel Pelsmaeker, working on programming languages. [homepage, DBLP, LinkedIn]. Supervised by Casper Bach Poulsen.
- Luka Miljak, working on refactoring. [homepage, DBLP, LinkedIn]. Supervised by Casper Bach Poulsen.
- Layne Liu, working on refactoring. [homepage, DBLP, LinkedIn]. Supervised by Casper Bach Poulsen.
Post-docs:
- Georgios Gousios (2013-2014), working on developer testing and GitHub in the TestRoots project [homepage, DBLP, LinkedIn]. Now associate professor at Delft University of Technology and chief researcher at Endor Labs.
- Annibale Panichella (2015-2016), working on testing in the TestRoots project [homepage, DBLP, LinkedIn]. Now assistant professor at Delft University of Technology.
- Fabio Palomba (2017), working on software quality and testing in the TestRoots project [homepage, DBLP, LinkedIn]. Now assistant professor at University of Salerno, Italy.
- Gema Rodriguez-Perez (2018), working on social structures in software development teams. [homepage, DBLP, LinkedIn, jointly supervised with Alexander Serebrenik]. Now assistant professor at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan, Canada.
- Gemma Catolino (2019-2020), working on software testing. [homepage, DBLP, LinkedIn]. Now assistant professor at Jheronimus Academy of Data Science, the Netherlands.
- Xavier Devroey (2017-2021), working on software testing in the STAMP project. [homepage, DBLP, LinkedIn]. Now assistant professor at University of Namur, Belgium.
- Mairieli Wessel (2021-2022) working in the TestShift project [homepage, DBLP, LinkedIn]. Now assistant professor at University of Nijmegen, the Netherlands.
- Pouria Derakhshanfar (2021-2022) working in the COSMOS project [homepage, DBLP, LinkedIn]. Supervised together with Annibale Panichella. Now researcher at JetBrains.
Scientific programmers:
- Joseph Hejderup (2015-2016) in the Pourquoi project [LinkedIn].
Visitors:
- Fabio Palomba, University of Salerno (Sept-Dec 2015).
- Maurício Aniche, University of São Paulo (Jan-Apr 2016).
- Dario Di Nucci, University of Salerno (May-Jul 2016 + March-May 2017).
- Gemma Catolino, University of Salerno (2017+2018+2019).
Research
My research interests can be situated in the larger area of software evolution and software testing.
My primary aim is to better understand what difficulties software engineers face (1) when maintaining the software and (2) when testing the software. I often use empirical research methods to get to the bottom of these difficulties. In a subsequent design science step, I try to develop tools and techniques to alleviate these difficulties.
More specifically, I have worked on reverse engineering existing software to better understand how it works and to offer people new to a software project a head start when trying to understand a software system. Something which is especially important in the light of missing or outdated requirements.
I also have a keen interest in trying to understand how making changes to a software impacts its quality. In particular, how people test for the changes and what problems they face when testing in general.
In other research, I also investigate: code clone management, repository mining, performance optimization, multi-tenancy, web API stability, agile requirements engineering (Just-In-Time Requirements Engineering) and automated static analysis tools (ASATs).