The Software Engineering Lab of the University of Mons (Belgium) has two vacant positions for PhD candidates to work on an F.R.S.-FNRS research project entitled "On the impact of workflow automation solutions on continuous collaborative open source software engineering".

** Project summary

Open source software (OSS) ecosystems are huge collections of interconnected and rapidly evolving software components. Developing software in these ecosystems is a continuous, highly distributed and collaborative endeavour involving thousands of contributors with diverse skills and interests. The complex socio-technical interactions in these ecosystems are plagued by a multitude of social and technical health issues.

To help communities to keep up with the rapid pace of producing and maintaining high-quality software releases, workflow automation solutions (e.g. bots to deploy releases, automated pull requests, continuous integration, testing code) are increasingly used to automate numerous repetitive activities that are intrinsically part of the continuous software engineering process. However, there is a lack of knowledge on the expected and actual benefits, limitations and impact of automating such activities as well as on the health issues in the rapidly growing ecosystem of workflow automation solutions.

Following a mixed-methods research approach, this project aims to quantitatively and qualitatively assess the usage, benefits and drawbacks of workflow automation solutions as well as their impact on the continuous software engineering process. By relying on state-of-the-art recommendation techniques, we will propose recommendation models for the adoption and adaptation of automation solutions to improve this continuous process. We will propose new techniques and metrics to detect and measure socio-technical issues and their impact in workflow automation solutions. We will  provide proactive and reactive socio-technical recommendations to reduce these issues and their impact, therefore improving the health of workflow automation solutions and their encompassing ecosystem.

** Work environment

The Software Engineering Lab, part of the Computer Science department of the Faculty of Sciences (University of Mons), is currently composed of one full professor (Tom Mens), one research associate (Alexandre Decan) and three PhD students. The lab is part of the UMONS INFORTECH Research Institute involving 120+ researchers from multiple faculties, enabling the lab members to interact with other researchers in related fields of research. The lab’s main research themes are software evolution, software quality, and model-driven software engineering.

A PhD position in our lab is an ideal stepping stone for an independent research career in academia or industry. Mons is centrally located in Europe, close to the French border. The university is French-speaking, but the lab host researchers of various nationalities, hence the working language for research activities will be English. The lab is well-connected to other research teams worldwide. The lab’s members have extensive interactions with prominent international research teams in the field as active members of the software engineering community, and through joint research projects, organised workshops and co-authorship of scientific publications.