News
Public PhD defense by Camilo Velazquez-Rodriguez on extracting library features from inconplete code on StackOverflow Friday, March 29, 2024
On 29 March 2024, Camilo Velazquez-Rodriguez successfully defended his PhD thesis in VUB (Belgium) under supervision of Coen De Roover.
Public PhD defense by Mehdi Golzadeh on automated identification of software development bots Thursday, June 22, 2023
On 22 June 2023, Mehdi Golzadeh successfully defended his PhD thesis entitled "Identifying Development Bots in Social Coding Platforms" under supervision of Tom Mens at the University of Mons, Belgium
Distinguished paper award for ICSME 2022 research paper Saturday, October 08, 2022
The paper "On the Use of GitHub Actions in Software Development Repositories" by A. Decan, T. Mens, P. Rostami Mazrae, and M. Golzadeh was awarded as Distinguished Paper at the 38th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME 2022).
Prestigious permanent position of "Chercheur Qualifié" granted to Alexandre Decan Saturday, October 01, 2022
The FNRS and UMONS have granted to Alexandre Decan, postdoctoral researcher on the SECOAssist project, a prestigious permanent position of research scientist at the Software Engineering Lab of the University of Mons.
BENEVOL 2022 organised at the University of Mons in September 2022 Monday, September 12, 2022
After a long period of virtual research meetings, the Software Engineering Lab of the University of Mons was very pleased and honoured to organise the [21st Belgium-Netherlands Software Evolution Workshop (BENEVOL)] on 12-13 September 2022.
Distinguished award for SANER 2022 research paper Wednesday, March 16, 2022
The paper [Uncovering Library Features from API Usage on Stack Overflow] by C. Velázquez-Rodríguez, E. Constantinou and C. De Roover was awarded IEEE Computer Society Distinguished Paper Award at the 29th IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER 2022).
SECOASSIST 2022 research seminar Friday, March 11, 2022
After a long period of only-virtual meetings, the interuniversity SECOASSIST research team was able to gather again, with a series of research presentations by the doctoral students that are finalising their PhD theses on a variety of research topics related to software ecosystems:
test amplification (Mehrdad Abdi, UAntwerpen), library identification and selection (Camillo Velázquez-Rodríguez, VUB), detection of software development bots (Mehdi Golzadeh, UMONS), reengineering of hybrid multi-database systems (Pol Benats, UNamur), code integration assistance (Ward Muylaert, VUB), collaborative development automation tools (Mehdi Golzadeh, UMONS), software framework instatiation patterns (Yunior Pacheco Correa, VUB), evolution of PolyStore (Maxime Gobart, UNamur)
PackagingCon 2021 talks by SECO-ASSIST researchers Thursday, November 11, 2021
During the first (virtual) conference on package managers, PackagingCon 2021, Ahmed Zerouali (VUB) and Tom Mens (UMONS) presented their research results on the topics of technical lag, outdatedness of software packages, and semantic versioning practices.
TSE article on backporting practices in package dependency networks Thursday, September 16, 2021
Researchers from UMONS and VUB published an article in IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering on [Analysing Backporting Practices in Package Dependency Networks].
SCP article on major zero versioning in package dependency networks Sunday, August 01, 2021
Lost in zero space? Researchers from UMONS published an article in Elsevier Science of Computer Programming on [An empirical comparison of 0.y.z releases in software package distributions]
Public PhD defense of Zeinab Abou Khalil Friday, February 26, 2021
Zeinab Abou Khalil publicly defended her PhD dissertation on "Understanding the impact of release policies on software development processes" jointly supervised by Tom Mens (University of Mons, Belgium) and Laurence Duchien (Université de Lille, France).
EMSE article on outdatedness and technical lack in Docker images Sunday, February 21, 2021
Joint research with UMONS, VUB and URJC (Madrid) on the outdatedness, security and technical lag of Debian-based Docker images is published in the Empirical Software Engineering journal.
SECO-ASSIST Research Seminar Wednesday, September 04, 2019
A one-day gathering of the SECO-ASSIST researchers. More information on this page.
Presentation of npm software ecosystem health at Drupal Camp Belgium Saturday, November 24, 2018
[Slides] Like many other web-based frameworks, Drupal is increasingly relying on JavaScript libraries (such as React, Node.JS, Angular and many more) for improving its user experience. However, relying on such JavaScript libraries implies a significant risk of breaking or compromising your applications. To illustrate this, we present a series of empirical results on the health of the npm dependency network for JavaScript packages. Our findings based on a historical data analysis show that the npm package ecosystem suffers from a range of important technical health issues related to how its dependency network is structured and evolves over time. Examples of such issues include the exponential growth of npm, the huge number of transitive dependencies, the abundance of outdated dependencies, and the long time it takes to fix security vulnerabilities and to benefit from these fixes in dependent packages. We provide empirical evidence of these problems, and suggest ways to reduce their potential impact by providing concrete guidelines.
Press release on Daily Science website about SECOHealth Monday, March 12, 2018
Comment va la santé de votre écosystème logiciel?
Christian Dubrulle, journaliste, présente les travaux de recherche du Prof. Tom Mens (UMONS) et ses collègues en Belgique et au Québec autour des écosystèmes logiciels dans le cadre des projets de recherche SECOHealth et SECO-ASSIST.
Presentation of SECO-ASSIST project at FNRS Science Club Thursday, February 22, 2018
Tom Mens, coordinator of the Excellence of Science Project SECO-ASSIST presented the project goals at FNRS for the Association belge des journalistes scientifiques (abjsc.be). The slides are available on SlideShare.
SECO-ASSIST: Automated Assistance for Developing Software in Ecosystems of the Future Tuesday, December 19, 2017
The 4-year research project "SECO-ASSIST: Automated Assistance for Developing Software in Ecosystems of the Future” has been selected for funding as part of the prestigious Belgian Excellence of Science (EOS) research programme, jointly financed by the Flemish FWO and Walloon FNRS research funding agencies. The collaborative research project will focus on fundamental research on software ecosystems, lead by Prof. Tom Mens (UMONS) and partnered by Serge Demeyer (Antwerpen), Anthony Cleve (UNamur) and Coen De Roover (VUB).