Academic Life

Depuis le lancement du podcast Pop-Code, nous avons eu une obsession : comprendre comment la fiction raconte le numérique. Chaque épisode était une tentative de décoder ces imaginaires, mais avec une contrainte : trente minutes pour explorer des films qui condensent des décennies de représentations technologiques. Autant dire que nous sortions souvent avec un petit goût de trop peu.

Il y a quelques semaines de ça, le Prof. Benoît Vanderose est arrivé un lundi de bon matin dans mon bureau en me tendant un café et en s’exclamant : “J’ai une super idée pour notre cours de Test et Qualité !” … Ce qui est génial quand on travaille avec quelqu’un comme le Prof. Vanderose, c’est qu’on n’est jamais à court d’idées. Mais quand ces idées concernent un cours que vous avez en commun, cela signifie généralement plus de travail qu’initialement planifié. Mais un cours donné dans la finalité en génie logiciel à des étudiants·es de master en informatique mérite bien cela ! Et nous voilà donc à discuter de comment faire pour faire l’état des lieux des pratiques de test et qualité en Fédération Wallonie Bruxelles.

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.

The week of April 15, we were in Lisbon for the 46th edition of the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2024 🇵🇹). Since 1975, ICSE has provided a forum where researchers, developers and educators come together to present and discuss the latest innovations, trends, experiences and problems in the field of software engineering. Given the current state of the art, it’s fair to say that this year was largely devoted to Large Language Models (LLMs), such as ChatGPT. Numerous presentations showed how these can (or cannot) be used to simplify developers’ lives or advance software engineering research. 🤔 In addition to the scientific presentations, ICSE week with its many co-located events is an opportunity to meet the whole software engineering research community in one place and build bridges with other international research groups. Master students in computer science will soon be taking advantage of this for their end-of-study internships, which can be carried out abroad with one of these groups. 😉

On Thursday, February 8, 2024, I, together with Gilles Perrouin and Maxime Cordy, received the Ten-years Most Influential Paper award at the 18th International Working Conference on Variability Modelling of Software-Intensive Systems (VAMOS ‘24) in Bern, Switzerland. The award recognizes our paper “Towards statistical prioritization for software product lines testing”, also published with Pierre-Yves Schobbens, Axel Legay and Patrick Heymans, for its impact on the research community over the last ten years. The paper presented and published at VAMOS ‘14 describes a (then) new method for prioritizing configurations and behaviors to be tested based on one or more files describing the behavior of highly configurable components. At the time of publication, I was a PhD assistant at the Faculty of Computer Science. After a 4-year postdoc at TU Delft in the Netherlands, I returned as an assistant professor at the Faculty of Computer Science in 2021. Gilles Perrouin was a postdoctoral fellow in the same faculty before obtaining a position as a Qualified Researcher at the FNRS in 2017. Maxime Cordy completed his thesis at the Faculty of Computer Science and is now a permanent researcher at the Interdisciplinary Research Centre on Security, Reliability and Trust (SnT) at the University of Luxembourg.