Projects

The practice of software testing is struggling to become widespread in the software development industry. This observation also applies to the academic world, where students often devote little energy to this activity, due to lack of motivation or time. To address these issues, this study explores the use of gamification as a lever of engagement in software testing. Following a state-of-the-art review of testing techniques and gamification principles applied to software development, an existing IntelliJ plugin was reused and enhanced. Initially centered on a system of achievements, this plugin was supplemented by a leaderboard, enabling a comparison of these two approaches. Achievements are badges, here represented by trophies, awarded when the user reaches certain levels of progress in the plugin. A leaderboard, on the other hand, is a table that ranks the various participants according to the points they have earned. The aim is to determine which mode favors student involvement, while having better performance in test writing.

Green software engineering is emerging as a crucial response to the rising energy impact of digital technologies, which may soon rival aviation and shipping combined. While several tools aim to help developers track energy consumption and detect regressions, they all have their own limitations. This motivated the development of EnergyTrackr, a fully modular and automated tool designed to detect statistically significant energy changes.

This thesis explores the impact of socio-technical debt on developer well-being. It combines two approaches: a quantitative approach (a structured questionnaire and a perceived stress scale) and a qualitative approach (a thematic analysis of open-ended responses). This study highlights existing links between perceived debt, social tensions, and workplace stress.

Software engineering for mixed reality headsets is still in its early genesis even though the required hardware for it has been available for several decades. Existing methods to streamline development are still limited and developers often find themselves doing things manually. Mixed Reality system testing, for example, are often done by hand by developers who have to wear the headsets and do the testing as if they were an end user. This is a significant time sink in the development process.

This thesis presents the development of a configurable tool that automatically injects web application vulnerabilities into existing Django codebases to support cybersecurity education. The primary goal is to enhance hands-on learning by allowing educators and students to engage with realistic, production-like environments that incorporate well-known security flaws, specifically drawn from the OWASP Top Ten 2021. Instead of generating synthetic applications, the tool modifies authentic Django projects, ensuring pedagogical relevance and structural fidelity.

This master thesis explores the design and validation of a context management tool integrated into a development environment. Developers constantly use various resources (documentation, terminal, development tools, etc.), which forces them to frequently switch between their development environment and these resources to meet their needs. This often leads to interruptions, distractions, and consequently, a drop in productivity. To address this issue, the study proposes a solution in the form of an extension for the Visual Studio Code IDE, called FlowTabs. This extension brings resources together into a unified interface and uses a relevance algorithm that adapts to the developer’s behavior to suggest the most appropriate resources. User testing has shown that it integrates well into the development environment, offering a satisfactory developer experience, cognitive comfort and effective resource management. This work thus provides an original context management solution, directly embedded in a development environment.

Virtual Reality (VR) is increasingly recognized as a technology with substantial commercial potential, progressively integrated into a wide array of everyday applications and supported by an expanding ecosystem of immersive devices. Despite this growth, the long-term adoption and maintenance of VR applications remain limited, particularly due to the lack of formalized software engineering practices adapted to the unique characteristics of VR environments. Among these challenges, the absence of effective, systematic, and reproducible tools for interaction testing constitutes a significant barrier to ensuring application quality and user experience.

Odoo, a company offering business management services through a modular web application, has continuously expanded the scope and complexity of its software over the years. This growing complexity raises challenges in terms of testing performance, readability, and maintainability. While existing tools such as Tours and Hoot provide solutions for system-level and unit-level testing respectively, a gap remains between the two. This thesis introduces a new approach called Hoot-Intégration, which extends the Hoot testing framework to support integration testing by enabling real server interactions in a lightweight environment. The proposed solution is implemented, validated, and compared against existing tests strategies from Odoo, showing notable gains in execution speed and test clarity. Although some technical limitations remain, the approach is effective and opens the door to future testing improvements in large and scaling modular systems like Odoo.

The Reliability of ML-enabled systems (REALM) project is scientific cooperation projects with France under the Hubert Curien Tournesol Program. The TOURNESOL program is implemented by Wallonie Bruxelles-International (WBI), in partnership with the F.R.S.-FNRS and for France, by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, in liaison with the Ministry of National Education, Research and Technology.