Research

Projects

Some research projects in which we are or have been involved are listed below:

• SECOAssist, an interuniversity Excellence of Science research collaboration with Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Universiteit Antwerpen and Université de Namur, focused on software ecosystems evolution.
• SECOHealth, an interuniversity collaboration with Polytechnique Montréal and University of Laval, Canada
• ARIAC by TRAIL4Wallonia, a big interuniversity research project around the teams of artificial intelligence in Wallonia
• “Software Development Workflow Ecosystems”, a mono-university research project financed by F.R.S.-FNRS

Tools

As part of our research we have been developing some open source tools, some of which are listed below:

• RABBIT is a tool to identify bot accounts in GitHub based on their recent events. It is reported in the MSR 2024 publication “RABBIT: A tool for identifying bot accounts based on their recent GitHub event history“.
• GAWD is a command-line tool to compute differences between GitHub Actions workflow files. It was reported in the MSR 2024 tool publication “gawd: A Differencing Tool for GitHub Actions Workflows”.
• BoDeGHa is a tool to identify bots in GitHub repositories by analysing pull request and issue comments. It was reported in the Journal of Systems and Software article “A ground-truth dataset and classification model for detecting bots in GitHub issue and PR comments“. BoDeGiC is another automated tool to identify bots in GitHub repositories by analysing git commit messages. It was reported in a BENEVOL 2020 workshop paper. Both tools were developed by Mehdi Golzadeh in the context of his PhD dissertation (defended in 2023).
• GAP is a very simple command-line tool that we created for forecasting future commit activity of contributors involved in software projects distributed through git. More information can be found in the journal publication “GAP: Forecasting commit activity in git projects” in Journal of Systems and Software.
• ConPan is a tool that was developed in 2019 by Ahmed Zerouali to inspect Docker containers, by extracting their installed packages and analyze their technical lag, vulnerabilities and other type of bugs. More information can be find in the associated MSR 2019 publication “ConPan: a tool to analyze packages in software containers“.
• Sismic is a Python library to define, simulate, execute and test statecharts, supporting test-driven development, behaviour-driven development, design by contract, and property statecharts to monitor violations of behavioural properties during statechart execution. It was developed in 2018 by Alexandre Decan in the context of a journal publication “A method for testing and validating executable statechart models” in Software & Systems Modeling.