News from the team

Dans un contexte où le développement logiciel évolue rapidement, souvent sous l’impulsion du monde industriel, il est essentiel pour les institutions d’enseignement supérieur de maintenir un lien étroit avec les pratiques professionnelles. Cette connexion permet d’adapter les programmes de formation aux réalités du terrain et de garantir la pertinence des compétences transmises aux étudiant·e·s.

This week, two members of our team are attending the IEEE International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation (ICST 2025) in Naples, Italy. On Monday, Balfroid Martin took the stage to share research conducted by Manon Galloy, a SNAILee who defended her master’s thesis in 2024. The focus of their presentation was on a novel technique known as SelfBehave, aimed at synthesizing user stories, which was featured during the A-MOST workshop.

It’s time for the January exams. Three years ago, my colleague Benoît Vanderose and I created a verification and validation course for the MSc in Software Engineering students. From the start, we both thought we needed a practical exam where students actually perform V&V tasks. So, for our exam, students have to analyze a codebase, read SonarQube reports, refactor code, correct bugs, and write tests. This was quite unusual for them (most courses are evaluated using projects or paper exams), and the students’ reaction three years ago was, let’s say, interesting.

Great news, Canada can now participate to European projects! The Walloon and Brussels regions have a deep diplomatic relationship with Québec, a French speaking Canadian region. So, a delegation of representative from CyberWal by Digital Wallonia embarked for a diplomatic trip. The WBI (Wallonie-Bruxelles International) organized a meeting with universities (Polytech Montreal and Concordia) as well as requested our presence at the North American version of the French “Forum inCyber). As it was my first time there, I decided to take a bit of time to travel around the land of the beaver (or the moose). Using the fruits of my networking skills built when I worked for the big D. I reconnected with previous colleagues working in Montreal and I secured a comfortable spot on a coach after landing and eating a poutine. I wanted to see how travelling was in Canada, so I booked buses and trains trips between Toronto, Niagara, Montreal and Québec. Twelve hours of bus made me think that renting cars could be nice as well. However, I was sure of it after taking the train. Leaving late, driving at around 50km/h, arriving late. Nevertheless, I always reached my destination which was a bit unexpected.

Johan and Simon’s research is a significant step towards the development of an ergonomic and mobile code editor empowered by the Language Server Protocol (LSP) for multi-language support. While code editing is traditionally computer-based, the current technological landscape is witnessing a significant shift toward mobile technologies. Their work not only addresses this shift but also paves the way for a concrete and productive application designed for multi-language development in a single code editor on mobile devices.