Research I'm Doing

Here are a few publications linked to both my current projects, followed by my older work while doing my PhD.

You can find most of the preprints / personal copies on ResearchGate, or contact me if you need more.

Artificial Intelligence for Software Engineering (AI4SENG)

This project investigates the usage of AI/ML/NLP tools to support software development. Some early results can be found under its gitlab repository. Paper to appear in PROFES 2025 (more soon).

Model-Driven for Agile Software Development (MDE4ASD)

This project is about bringing more modelling practices into agile software development. We look into generating models from textual documents (e.g., user stories) for further analysis, or extracting information from discussions on messaging apps. Here’s a list of the publications in that area. You can find some resources on our gitlab repository.

Josephs A., Gilson F. and Galster M. (2022) Towards Automatic Classification of Design Decisions from Developer Conversations. In 2022 IEEE 19th International Conference on Software Architecture Companion (ICSA-C) IEEE. DOI
Gilson F., Annand S. and Steel J. (2020). Recording software design decisions on the fly. In Joint Proceedings of SEED and NLPaSE co-located with 27th Asia Pacific Software Engineering Conference, (pp.) 53-66), CEUR 2799 LINK
Gilson, F., Galster, M., and Georis, F. (2020). Generating Use Case Scenarios from User Stories. In Proc. of the 2020 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software and System Processes (ICSSP) (pp. 31–40). ACM. DOI
Galster, M., Gilson, F., and Georis, F. (2019). What Quality Attributes Can We Find in Product Backlogs? A Machine Learning Perspective. In Software Architecture (pp. 88–96). Springer International Publishing. DOI
Gilson, F., and Weyns, D. (2019). When Natural Language Processing Jumps into Collaborative Software Engineering. In Proceedings of 2019 IEEE International Conference on Software Architecture Companion (ICSA-C) (pp. 238–241). IEEE Computer Society. DOI
Gilson, F., Galster, M., and Georis, F. (2019). Extracting Quality Attributes from User Stories for Early Architecture Decision Making. Proceedings of 2019 IEEE International Conference on Software Architecture Companion (ICSA-C) (pp. 129–136). IEEE. DOI
Gilson, F., and Irwin, C. (2018). From User Stories to Use Case Scenarios towards a Generative Approach. In Proc. of 25th Australasian Software Engineering Conference (ASWEC) (pp. 61–65). DOI

Software Testing

A very recent interest sparkled in software testing and more particularly, in the broader scope of DevOps-friendly software development processes. The goal is to understand how to better support software testers through better practices, methods and more automation. See also our gitlab repository.

Filipovic, M., Gilson, F. (2025). Towards Improving Behavior-Driven Development and Acceptance Testing-Driven Development Teaching in a University Project Course. In Agile Processes in Software Engineering and Extreme Programming – Workshops. XP 2024. Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, vol 524. Springer, DOI
Filipovic M., Gilson F. (2024) Which Combination of Test Metrics Can Predict Success of a Software Project? A Case Study in a Year-Long Project Course, ArXiv 2408.12120, DOI
van Heugten Breurkes, J., Gilson, F., and Galster, M. (2022) Overlap between Automated Unit and Acceptance Testing – a Systematic Literature Review. In Proc. of the International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering 2022 (EASE 2022). ACM, DOI

Software Engineering Education

This group of works are looking into how to improve the teaching and learning of software engineering practices in the large. We looked over how to teach about usability in software language engineering and code quality assurance (mostly related to technical debt).

Clarke A., Mitrović T., Gilson F. (2025) Improving Software Engineering Team Communication Through Stronger Social Networks, In 2025 IEEE/ACM 37th International Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training (CSEE&T). DOI
Minish M., Gilson F. and Galster M. (2024) ScrumBoard: A Project Management Tool Purpose-Built for Software Engineering Education, In 36th International Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training (CSEE&T). DOI, gitlab
Minish M., Galster M., Gilson F (2024). Think Before You Scrum - An Experience Report on Daily Scrums to Aid Reflection, In 36th International Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training (CSEE&T), IEEE, DOI
Morales-Trujillo, M., Galster, M., Gilson, F., and Mathews, M. (2021) A Three-Year Study on Peer Evaluation in a Software Engineering Project Course, in IEEE Transactions on Education. DOI.
Gilson, F., Morales, M., and Mathews, M. (2020). How Junior Developers Deal with Their Technical Debt?. In Proc. of 2020 IEEE/ACM International Conference on Technical Debt (TechDebt) (pp. 51–61). ACM. DOI
Gilson, F. (2018). Teaching software language engineering and usability through students peer reviews. In Proc. 21st ACM/IEEE International Conference on Model Driven Engineering Languages and Systems (MODELS ‘18) (pp. 98–105). ACM. DOI

Software Security

This new-ish line of work looks at bringing software security practices into NZ’s curriculum in a more practical way, as well as making penetration testing and fuzzing more approachable to beginners:

De Baets A., Nguyen G., Devroey X, Gilson F (2025). FETT: Fault Injection as an Educational and Training Tool in Cybersecurity. Proceedings of the 40th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE), Author’s copy, gitlab

Communication channel and developer knowledge

Some work I’m doing with one PhD students on communication channels and knowledge retrieval, mostly the work of Camila Costa Silva.

Costa Silva C., Galster M., Gilson F. (2024). Applying short text topic models to instant messaging communication of software developers, In Journal of Systems and Software 112111, Elsevier, DOI
Costa Silva C., Galster M. and Gilson F. (2022). A qualitative analysis of themes in instant messaging communication of software developers. In Journal of Systems and Software 111397, Elsevier. DOI
Costa Silva, C., Galster, M. and Gilson, F. (2021). Topic modeling in software engineering research. In Empir Software Eng 26, 120. DOI
Costa Silva, C., Gilson, F., and Galster, M. (2019). Comparison Framework for Team-Based Communication Channels. In Product-Focused Software Process Improvement (PROFES) (pp. 315–322). Springer International Publishing. DOI

Older stuff (reverse-chronological order)

Mostly some works I’ve done during my PhD (software architecture and model-driven and transformations stuff), side projects (Internet of Things) and post doc (web-based system called WebDeb to trace argumentation and discourse analysis).

Amrani, M., Gilson, F., and Englebert, V. (2018). Complex Event Processing for User-Centric Management of IoT Systems. In Model-Driven Engineering and Software Development, Communications in Computer and Information Science (Vol 880) (pp. 426–448). Springer International Publishing. DOI
Amrani, M., Gilson, F., Debieche, A., and Englebert, V. (2017). Towards User-centric DSLs to Manage IoT Systems. In Proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Model-Driven Engineering and Software Development (pp. 569–576). DOI
Gilson, F., Bittar, A., and Schobbens, P. (2017). Public Debates on the Web. In Web Engineering, ICWE 2017, Lecture Notes in Computer Sciences (pp. 520–532). DOI
Gilson, F., and Englebert, V. (2016). Flexible Component Composition through Communication Abstraction. In MODELSWARD 2016 - Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Model-Driven Engineering and Software Development (pp. 442–449). SciTePress. DOI
Gilson, F. (2015). Transformation-Wise Software Architecture Framework - A Transformational Approach to Design Component-Based Systems. (Doctoral dissertation, University of Namur). URL
Gilson, F., and Englebert, V. (2015). Transformation-Wise Design of Software Architectures. In Model-Driven Engineering and Software Development, Communications in Computer and Information Science (Vol 506) (pp. 49–65). DOI
Gilson, F., and Englebert, V. (2015). Software Architecture Design by Stepwise Model Transformations - A Comparative Case Study. In MODELSWARD 2015 - Proceedings of the 3rd International Conference on Model-Driven Engineering and Software Development. SciTePress. DOI
Gilson, F., and Englebert, V. (2015). Challenging a Transformation-Wise Architecture Framework in a Comparative Case Study. In Model-Driven Engineering and Software Development. Communications in Computer and Information Science (Vol. 580) (pp. 213–229). DOI
Gilson, F., and Englebert, V. (2014). A Domain Specific Language for Stepwise Design of Software Architectures. In MODELSWARD 2014 - Proceedings of the 2nd International Conference on Model-Driven Engineering and Software Development. SciTePress. DOI
Gilson, F., and Englebert, V. (2011). Towards handling architecture design, variability and evolution with model transformations. In Proceedings of the Fifth International Workshop on Variability Modelling of Software-Intensive Systems (VAMOS) (pp. 39–48). ACM. DOI
Gilson, F., and Englebert, V. (2011). Rationale, decisions and alternatives traceability for architecture design. In Proceedings of the 5th European Conference on Software Architecture: Companion Volume. ACM. DOI
Gilson, F. (2010). A Transformational Approach for Component-Based Distributed Architectures. In Preliminary Proceedings of the MODELS 2010 Doctoral Symposium (pp. 25–30). URL
Gilson, F. (2009). Coping with large-scale architecture design and evolution with model transformations. In Pre-proceedings of the 4th Summer School on Generative and Transformational Techniques in Software Engineering.
Gilson, F., Englebert, V., and Matulevicius, R. (2008). A large scope transformational approach for distributed architecture design. In Software Architecture (pp. 334–337). Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg. DOI