Celebrating Automated Software Engineering

For decades, the IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE), a top conference in software engineering, has brought together researchers and practitioners to address challenges of automating the analysis, design, implementation, testing, and maintenance of large software systems. This year’s ASE was held in November in San Diego, CA where Prof. Joshua Garcia and Prof. Julia Rubin of the University of British Columbia co-organized the Celebration of ASE (CASE), a workshop which assembled members of the ASE Program Committee (PC) and other researchers to foster networking and discussions about the software-engineering community.

To support these goals, CASE included four sessions and two panels. To open the workshop, 24 PC members each gave a short talk introducing themselves and their research. Professors Iftekhar Ahmed and Garcia were among the PC members that presented as part of these opening talks. Ahmed discussed his research on automated testing of conversational agents and highly configurable systems, and bug-proneness prediction. Garcia presented on his work in the areas of software security, architecture, testing, and analysis.

Seven PC members gave 20-minute talks about their research projects. These talks covered topics involving machine learning, automatic program repair, program analysis, challenges in software merging, and testing for a widely used children’s programming language. “It is exceedingly rare for researchers with the expertise of PC members from a top software-engineering conference to all be presenting at a single streamlined event. CASE provided exactly such an opportunity, giving attendees a rich research and networking experience,” says Garcia.

The two panels focused on reviewer experience and software-engineering community-level challenges and opportunities. The panel on reviewer experience included four PC members with reputations for producing high quality reviews. Panelists discussed characteristics of high quality reviews and how to produce them. The panel on software-engineering community-level challenges and opportunities considered the impact of software-engineering research on practice, possible directions of future software-engineering research, and means of fostering the software-engineering community in general. One of the panel members, Prof. Nenad Medvidović of the University of Southern California, brought valuable insights from decades worth of software-engineering community experiences to the panel.

For more information, Prof. Garcia can be reached at: joshug4@uci.edu.