AI x Software Engineering & Testing (ASET)

Drawing equally on theory and practice, the aim of the research group is to produce practical software engineering solutions for industry, improving the productivity of developers and testers, and improving the reliability of software systems. 

The group investigates a number of areas, including model-based testing, search-based testing, security testing, reverse engineering, model-driven engineering, multi-agent modelling and XML data processing.

Crossing the boundaries between the recovery and verification of designs, to the generation of economical test-suites that exercise software completely, our research has created innovative tools for industry, including: EvoSuite, IGUANA, JWalk, Broker@Cloud, HOLTestGen (test generation), StateChum, SUMO (reverse engineering) and FLAME (agent-based modelling). Our work is funded by the EU, EPSRC, InnovateUK and industry.

Research themes

Model-based Testing

This formal testing method generates complete functional test suites from a model/specification expressed as an extended finite state machine, and offers guarantees of correctness once testing is complete. The work has been used at Daimler for testing automotive systems designed using Harel Statecharts, applied to testing the gate-logic on low-power ARM chips, used for unit testing Java and also used to test software services for SAP and SingularLogic in the Cloud. Several software testing tools have grown out of this work, including StateTest, JWalk and Broker@Cloud.

Leaders: Prof Rob Hierons, Dr Anthony Simons, Dr Kirill Bogdanov

Search-based Testing

Search-based testing uses a problem-specific fitness function to guide a search process (such as a genetic algorithm) to automatically generate test cases or select from a given set of test cases. Fitness is judged by instrumenting the tested code to measure what is covered by the tests. The approach has been applied to large C programs and also to object-oriented programs in Java. Several software tools have grown out of this work, including EvoSuite for Java, and IGUANA for C.

Leaders: Prof Rob Hierons, Dr Neil Walkinshaw, Prof Phil McMinn

Property-based Testing

Property-based testing provides a high-level approach to testing and is a complementary technique to model-based testing. Rather than focusing on individual test cases to encapsulate the behaviour of a system, in property-based testing this behaviour is specified by properties, expressed in a logical form. The system is then tested by checking whether it has the required properties for randomly generated data, which may be inputs to functions, sequences of API calls, or other representations of test cases. This work has resulted in a code coverage tool (Smother) and a mutation testing tool (Mu2) for the Erlang language.

Leaders: Prof John Derrick, Dr Kirill Bogdanov

Security Testing

Security encompasses information security, software engineering, security engineering, and formal methods. Our research in this area investigates all security aspects of distributed and service-oriented systems. This includes applied security aspects, such as access control or business-process modelling, as well as fundamental aspects, such as novel static and dynamic approaches for ensuring the security of applications. We participate in the development of interactive theorem proving environments for Z (HOL-Z) and UML/OCL (HOL-OCL, which is integrated into a formal MDE tool-chain) and a model-based test-case generator (HOL-TestGen).

Leaders: Professor John Clark

Model-Driven Engineering

The aim of this approach is to create systems not by writing program code, but rather by generating it from high-level abstract models that are closer to end-user requirements. What initial models and languages should be chosen? How should models be checked? How should they be folded together to create more detailed system specifications? How should the transformation rules be verified? Our work so far has investigated dependently-typed languages as a means of verifying model transformations, has generated simple information systems from requirements and has also generated platform-specific test suites for SOAP or REST-based software services in the Cloud.

Leaders: Dr Anthony Simons, Prof John Derrick

Reverse Engineering

This novel approach recovers specifications from legacy software systems. The reverse engineering method collects traces of the system's execution and performs grammar inference on the traces, to detect behavioural regularity. From this, finite state models are constructed, which allow further hypotheses about the specification to be generated and tested. The approach has been applied to recover both flat and nested state specifications, and used for the supervised re-modularisation of software systems. Software tools include StateChum (for reverse engineering) and SUMO (for supervised re-modularisation).

Leaders: Dr Neil Walkinshaw, Dr Kirill Bogdanov

XML Data Processing

The rise of distributed data processing in the Cloud has led to a resurgence of non-relational key-value and tree-structured data formats like XML. This has opened up new research areas in XML data compression, distribution and storage, with associated issues of data indexing and query-processing. We have developed algorithms for fast searching in distributed XML databases using sparse binary matrix indexing; and for trust-based access control to XML data with dynamic learning. The technology has been applied in Botswana for the distributed mobile phone hosting of compressed XML databases.

Leaders: Dr Siobhán North

Software Engineering

Why do software development projects frequently fail, and what can be done about it? This strand of our research has investigated both traditional and agile software development methods, to see how they work in practice. We have published internationally-famous critiques of the UML notation and associated development process, and also of the Agile method known as XP (eXtreme Programming). We have collaborated with work psychologists to monitor the behaviour and effectiveness of developer teams in our own software company Genesys Solutions, revealing how the constitution of teams affects how well they work.

Leaders: Dr Anthony Simons

Affiliated academics

• Prof Graham Birtwistle (University of Calgary)
• Eur Ing Dr Anthony J Cowling (Honorary)
• Dr Dimitris Dranidis (International Faculty)
• Dr George Eleftherakis (International Faculty)
• Prof Gordon Fraser ( University of Passau)
• Prof W Michael L Holcombe (Honorary)
• Prof Petros Kefalas (International Faculty)
• Dr Mariam Kiran
• Dr Raluca Lefticaru
• Dr Ioanna Stamatopoulou (International Faculty)
• Dr Ramsay Taylor

Publications

Academic articles

Here you can find research publications for the AI x Software Engineering & Testing Research Group, listed by academic.  The head link navigates to the official web page for the relevant academic (with highlighted favourite publications).  The remaining links navigate to their DBLP author page, their Google Scholar citations page and optionally a self-maintained publications page.

Academic staff

Prof Phil McMinn	DBLP	Google Scholar	Web
Dr Kirill E Bogdanov	DBLP	Google Scholar	Web
Prof John Derrick	DBLP	Google Scholar
Prof Rob Hierons	DBLP	Google Scholar	Web
Dr Siobhán D North	DBLP	Google Scholar	Web
Dr Jose Miguel Rojas Siles	DBLP	Google Scholar	Web
Dr Donghwan Shin	DBLP	Google Scholar	Web
Dr Anthony JH Simons	DBLP	Google Scholar	Web
Dr Neil Walkinshaw	DBLP	Google Scholar	Web

Affiliated academics

Prof Graham Birtwistle	DBLP	Google Scholar
Eur Ing Dr Anthony J Cowling	DBLP	Google Scholar
Dr Dimitris Dranidis	DBLP	Google Scholar
Dr George Eleftherakis	DBLP	Google Scholar
Prof Gordon Fraser	DBLP	Google Scholar	Web
Prof W Michael L Holcombe	DBLP	Google Scholar
Prof Petros Kefalas	DBLP	Google Scholar
Dr Mariam Kiran	DBLP	Google Scholar
Dr Raluca-Elena Lefticaru	DBLP	Google Scholar
Dr Ioanna Stamatopoulou	DBLP	Google Scholar
Dr Ramsay Taylor	DBLP	Google Scholar

Affiliated researchers 

Dr Mike Croucher	GoogleScholar
Prof Paul Richmond	DBLP	GoogleScholar	Web

Research theses

Here you can find recently-published PhD (and MPhil) theses, which have been deposited in the White Rose eTheses Online repository.  Follow links to the abstract, and then to the full thesis (if public) or to a request form (if a time-embargo restriction has been placed on public release).

Recently published theses

Dr Islam Elgendy	2025	Enhancing and Evaluating Software Test Case Diversity
Dr Richard Somers	2025	Causal Surrogate Models: Adding "What If" to Cyber-Physical System Testing
Dr Muhammad Firhard Roslan	2025	Test Suite Health: Automatically Improving the Reliability and Effectiveness of Test Suites
Dr Owain Parry	2023	Understanding and Mitigating Flaky Software Test Cases
Dr Andrew Graham Clark	2023	Establishing the Causal Foundations of Metamorphic Testing: A Novel Application of Causal Inference for Testing Computational Modelling Software
Dr Ibrahim Althomali	2022	Automated Classification and Repair of Presentation Failures in Responsive Web Pages
Dr Benjamin Simon Clegg	2021	The application of mutation testing to enhance the automated assessment of introductory programming assignments
Dr Qamar Naith	2021	Crowdsourced Testing Approach For Mobile Compatibility Testing
Dr Eidah Alzahrani	2021	The impact of minimising data movement on the overall performance of the simulation of complex systems applied to FLAME GPU
Dr Nasser Albunian	2020	An Investigation of Search Behaviour in Search-Based Unit Test Generation
Dr Abdullah Alsharif	2020	Automated Software Testing of Relational Database Schemas
Dr Michael Foster	2020	Reverse Engineering Systems to Identify Flaws and Understand Behaviour
Dr Thomas Weripuo Gyeera	2019	Monitoring and Adaptation of Pooled Cloud Computing Resources
Dr Michael Herzberg	2019	Formal Foundations for Provably Safe Web Components
Dr David Paterson	2019	Improvements to Test Case Prioritisation considering Efficiency and Effectiveness on Real Faults
Dr Thomas White	2019	Guiding Random Graphical and Natural User Interface Testing Through Domain Knowledge
Dr Michal Soucha	2019	Testing and Active Learning of Resettable Finite-State Machines
Dr Sadeen Alharbi	2018	Automatic Framework to Aid Therapists to Diagnose Children who Stutter
Dr Krenare Pireva	2018	Cloud eLearning - Personalisation of Learning using Resources from the Cloud
Dr Thomas Walsh	2018	Automatic Identification of Presentation Failures in Responsive Web Pages
Dr Ermira Daka	2018	Improving Readability in Automatic Unit Test Generation
Dr Shtwai Alsubai	2018	Child Prime Label Approaches to Evaluate XML Structured Queries
Dr José Carlos Medeiros de Campos	2017	Search-based Unit Test Generation for Evolving Software
Dr Hanaa Al Zadjali	2017	Compressing Labels of Dynamic XML Data using Base-9 Scheme and Fibonacci Encoding
Dr Dimitrios Kourtesis	2017	Policy-Driven Governance in Cloud Service Ecosystems
Dr Maria Ulfah Siregar	2016	Support for Model Checking Z Specifications
Mr Samer Al Khazraji	2016	A Labelling Technique Comparison for Indexing Large XML Database
Dr Sina Shamshiri	2016	Automated Unit Testing of Evolving Software
Mr Konstantinos Rousis	2016	Disciplined Exploitation of Emergent Properties
Dr Abdullah Alsaeedi	2016	Improving Software Model Inference by Combining State Merging and Markov Models
Dr Rustem Dautov	2016	EXCLAIM Framework: a Monitoring and Analysis Framework to Support Self-Governance in Cloud Application Platforms
Dr Fotios Gonidis	2016	A Framework Enabling the Cross-Platform Development of Service-based Cloud Applications
Dr Christopher Wright	2016	Mutation Analysis of Relational Database Schemas
Dr Alaa Almelibari	2015	Labelling Dynamic XML Documents: a Group Based Approach
Dr Ahmad Subahi	2015	A Business User Model-Driven Engineering Method for Developing Information Systems
Dr Othlapile Dinakenyane	2014	SIQXC: Schema Independent Queryable XML Compression for Smartphones
Ms Isidora Petreska	2014	Biologically Inspired Agents: A Framework for Formal Modelling and Simulation of Agents with Elementary Spatial Attributes
Dr Joseph Vella	2014	An Object-Oriented Data and Query Model
Dr Andrea Corbett	2013	Agent-Based Modelling of Transactive Memory Systems and Knowledge Processes in Agile versus Traditional Software Development Teams
Dr Sheeva Afshan	2013	Search-Based Generation of Human Readable Test Data and Its Impact on Human Oracle Costs
Dr Norah Farooqi	2013	Applying Dynamic Trust Based Access Control to Improve XML Databases Security
Dr Mathew Hall	2013	Improving Software Remodularisation
Dr Ognen Paunovski	2013	Exploring Emergent Phenomena: Towards Analysis and Synthesis of Emergent Formations in Complex Systems
Dr Ervin Ramollari	2013	Automated Verification and Testing of Third-Party Web Services