Dr Neil Walkinshaw
Department of Computer Science
Senior Lecturer in Testing
Director of Equality, Diversity and Inclusivity
Member of the Testing research group

+44 114 222 1968
Full contact details
Department of Computer Science
Regent Court (DCS)
211 Portobello
Sheffield
S1 4DP
- Profile
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Dr Neil Walkinshaw studied his Ph.D. (2002-2005) at the University of Strathclyde on the use of static analysis to support software inspections. He subsequently spent five years (2005-2010) as a postdoc at the University of Sheffield, working on state machine inference and software testing (an area in which he is still active).
This was followed by 8 years as a Lecturer then Senior Lecturer / Associate Professor at the Department of Informatics at the University of Leicester. He took up his current position as a Senior Lecturer at the University of Sheffield in 2018.
- Research interests
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Dr Walkinshaw's research and teaching focus is on software quality assurance. His research has a particular emphasis on “black-box” components - software units that lack documentation and cannot be scrutinised internally.
He specialises in applying Machine Learning and other data analysis algorithms to the specific activities of testing, reverse-engineering, and safety-case assessment.
- Publications
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Books
- Software Quality Assurance. Springer International Publishing.
Journal articles
- Effectively Incorporating Expert Knowledge in Automated Software Remodularisation. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. View this article in WRRO
- Predicting postpartum hemorrhage (PPH) during cesarean delivery using the Leicester PPH Predict tool: a retrospective cohort study.. American Journal of Perinatology, 35(2), 163-169. View this article in WRRO
- Inferring extended finite state machine models from software executions. Empirical Software Engineering, 21(3), 811-853. View this article in WRRO
- Assessing and generating test sets in terms of behavioural adequacy. Software Testing, Verification and Reliability, 25(8), 749-780. View this article in WRRO
- Automated comparison of state-based software models in terms of their language and structure. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, 22(2).
- STAMINA: a competition to encourage the development and assessment of software model inference techniques. Empirical Software Engineering, 1-34.
- TAIC-PART 2009-Testing: Academic & Industrial Conference - Practice And Research Techniques: Special Section Editorial. J SYST SOFTWARE, 83(12), 2367-2368.
- A framework for the competitive evaluation of model inference techniques. MIIT 2010 - Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Model Inference In Testing, Held in Conjunction with ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis, ISSTA 2010, 1-9.
- Incrementally discovering testable specifications from program executions. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), 6286 LNCS, 272-289.
- Property-based testing - The ProTest project. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), 6286 LNCS, 250-271.
- Improving dynamic software analysis by applying grammar inference principles. J SOFTW MAINT EVOL-R, 20(4), 269-290.
- Validation and discovery from computational biology models.. Biosystems, 93(1-2), 141-150.
- Balanced FSM generation for empirical studies. 2008 IEEE International Conference on Software Testing Verification and Validation Workshop, ICSTW'08, 371-375.
Chapters
- Chapter 1 Reverse-Engineering Software Behavior (pp. 1-58).
- Reverse-Engineering Software Behavior, Advances in Computers (pp. 1-58). Elsevier
- Adapting Grammar Inference Techniques to Mine State Machines, Mining Software Specifications (pp. 59-83). CRC Press
Conference proceedings papers
- Motivating Adult Learners by Introducing Programming Concepts with Scratch. Proceedings of the 4th European Conference on Software Engineering Education
- Reasoning about Uncertainty in Empirical Results. Proceedings of the Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering View this article in WRRO
- Improving Scratch Programming with CRC-Card Design. Proceedings of the 14th Workshop in Primary and Secondary Computing Education on - WiPSCE'19, 23 October 2019 - 25 October 2019.
- Are 20% of Files Responsible for 80% of Defects?. Proceedings of the 12th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement, 11 October 2018 - 12 October 2018. View this article in WRRO
- Comparison of Search-Based Algorithms for Stress-Testing Integrated Circuits (pp 198-212)
- Testing Functional Black-Box Programs Without a Specification (pp 101-120)
- How Do Automatically Generated Unit Tests Influence Software Maintenance?. 2018 IEEE 11th International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation (ICST), 9 April 2018 - 13 April 2018.
- Uncertainty-Driven Black-Box Test Data Generation. 2017 IEEE International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation (ICST), 13 March 2017 - 17 March 2017. View this article in WRRO
- Using Segment-Based Alignment to Extract Packet Structures from Network Traces. 2017 IEEE International Conference on Software Quality, Reliability and Security (QRS), 25 July 2017 - 29 July 2017.
- Inferring Computational State Machine Models from Program Executions. 2016 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME), 2 October 2016 - 7 October 2016. View this article in WRRO
- Data and Analysis Code for GP EFSM Inference. 2016 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME), 2 October 2016 - 7 October 2016. View this article in WRRO
- Choreography-Based Analysis of Distributed Message Passing Programs. 2016 24th Euromicro International Conference on Parallel, Distributed, and Network-Based Processing (PDP), 17 February 2016 - 19 February 2016.
- A Search Based Approach for Stress-Testing Integrated Circuits (pp 80-95)
- Visualising software as a particle system. 2015 IEEE 3rd Working Conference on Software Visualization (VISSOFT), 27 September 2015 - 28 September 2015.
- SEPIA: Search for Proofs Using Inferred Automata (pp 246-255)
- Black-Box Test Generation from Inferred Models. 2015 IEEE/ACM 4th International Workshop on Realizing Artificial Intelligence Synergies in Software Engineering, 17 May 2015 - 17 May 2015.
- An evidential reasoning approach for assessing confidence in safety evidence. 2015 IEEE 26th International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE), 2 November 2015 - 5 November 2015.
- Quantifying Uncertainty in Safety Cases Using Evidential Reasoning (pp 413-418)
- Mining State-Based Models from Proof Corpora (pp 282-297)
- Establishing the Source Code Disruption Caused by Automated Remodularisation Tools. 2014 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution, 29 September 2014 - 3 October 2014.
- Software analytics = sharing information. Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Predictive Models in Software Engineering - PROMISE '13, 9 October 2013 - 9 October 2013.
- Using evidential reasoning to make qualified predictions of software quality. Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Predictive Models in Software Engineering - PROMISE '13, 9 October 2013 - 9 October 2013.
- Inferring Extended Finite State Machine models from software executions. 2013 20th Working Conference on Reverse Engineering (WCRE), 14 October 2013 - 17 October 2013.
- Supervised software modularisation. IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance, ICSM (pp 472-481)
- Model-based testing and model inference. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), Vol. 7609 LNCS(PART 1) (pp 440-443)
- Behaviourally adequate software testing. Proceedings - IEEE 5th International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation, ICST 2012 (pp 300-309)
- Assessing test adequacy for black-box systems without specifications. Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics), Vol. 7019 LNCS (pp 209-224)
- A multiobjective optimisation approach for the dynamic inference and refinement of agent-based model specifications. 2011 IEEE Congress of Evolutionary Computation, CEC 2011 (pp 2237-2244)
- Using compression algorithms to support the comprehension of program traces. Proceedings of the 2010 Workshop on Dynamic Analysis, WODA 2010 (pp 8-13)
- A message from the programme chairs. TAIC PART 2009 - Testing: Academic and Industrial Conference - Practice and Research Techniques
- Computing the Structural Difference between State-Based Models.. WCRE (pp 177-186)
- Automated discovery of state transitions and their functions in source code. SOFTWARE TESTING VERIFICATION & RELIABILITY, Vol. 18(2) (pp 99-121)
- Inferring Finite-State Models with Temporal Constraints.. ASE (pp 248-257)
- Feature Location and Extraction using Landmarks and Barriers.. ICSM (pp 54-63)
- View this article in WRRO
- Software Quality Assurance. Springer International Publishing.
- Professional activities
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Member of the Testing research group