mastodon 4.8.0-nightly.2026-10-06Software researcher at https://cispa.de., working on https://fandango-fuzzer.github.io, https://www.cispa.de/s3, @TheFuzzingBook@mastodon.social, @TheDebuggingBook@mastodon.social, and more. Testing, debugging, analyzing, and protecting software for a better world.
Advice to young researchers! On Monday at #ASE2026 in Munich, I will be giving two talks:
Will post all slides after the talks. Meet me at ASE!
I got interviewed by Nature on how to catch bugs in scientific software. My "Basics of Debugging 101" were:
1. Proceed systematically
2. Find out when the bug occurs
3. Explain the bug to a rubber duck
4. Write tests that replicate the bug
Enjoy the read! https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01261-w
I am happy to report that I have been named the recipient of the
2026 Harlan D. Mills award
"for sustained contributions to software debugging, program analysis, mining software repositories, and automated test generation."
Let me thank my nominator Tom Zimmermann, my endorsers Lionel Briand, Mira Mezini, Gail Murphy, Matt Dwyer, Ahmed E. Hassan, the selection committee led by Massimiliano Di Penta, and of course all of you supporters over the years. See you soon!
https://www.computer.org/volunteering/awards/mills
I‘m gonna need a bigger suitcase #ICSE2026
On my way to Rio de Janiero, visiting #ICSE2026 - here with Tural Mammadov. See you soon!
Impact award! I am happy to report that my ICSE 2006 paper "Mining metrics to predict component failures," with Nachi Nagappan and Thomas Ball, has been selected to receive a retrospective ICSE SEIP Most Influential Paper Award for its significant and lasting impact on the software engineering community. Read it here: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/1134285.1134349
In the #ICSE2026 Wednesday 14:00 session, I will be giving my Harlan D. Mills Award talk (likely at 14:10 already). Enjoy! https://conf.researchr.org/details/icse-2026/icse-2026-main-plenaries/8/IEEE-Computer-Society-Harlan-D-Mills-Award-and-Talk-by-Andreas-Zeller-Should-Comput
About time: A multi-celebration for becoming a member of Academia Europaea, my SIGSOFT Influential Educator Award, my 60th birthday, becoming an IEEE Fellow, _and_ getting the 2026 IEEE Harlan D. Mills Award. With cake and fizzy drinks!
Starting this year, I will only review for conferences that get rid of a "bidding" phase, as allowing reviewers to bid on papers they want to review opens too many opportunities for manipulation and collusion. For details, see https://andreas-zeller.info/2025/12/07/Reviewer-Author-Collusion-Rings-and-How-to-Fight-Them.html #nobidding
How do execution features relate to failures? In this new @ACM@mastodon.acm.org TOSEM paper, Marius Smytzek, Martin Eberlein, Lars Grunske, and I analyze which execution features beyond code coverage correlate best with failures and lead to accurate explanations of failure causes: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3783989
The #IEEE Computer Society interviewed me on my past and the Future of Automated #Debugging and Software #Testing Enjoy! https://www.computer.org/publications/tech-news/insider-membership-news/2026-harlan-automated-debugging
In a call "retrieve(account: string)", nobody checks the contents of "account". What if we could specify its type not just as a string, but as a formal language - say, a regex "[0-9]+"? In our new paper "FLAT: Formal Languages as Types" with Fengmin Zhu, we do exactly this - for better type checking and even test generation: https://doi.acm.org/?doi=3799978
This is the output I want. What input do I need? Today at ICSE - International Conference on Software Engineering, Tural Mammadov presented his work on Modelizer - the framework that learns from synthesized program executions to predict inputs from outputs and vice versa: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3748720
My successor as a professor will be some AI video tutor with the appearance of Brad Pitt, available 24/7, unlimited patience, personalized towards each student, the ability to teach any subject ever discussed in a textbook, and a cost of < 1$/hour. Good thing I can still do research! (Now wait...)
Planning to visit #FSE2026 in Montreal? Do not miss our #Fandango tutorial on Sunday, July 5, where we show how to systematically generate inputs and interactions for comprehensive software testing (with José Antonio Zamudio Amaya, Marius Smytzek, and Alexander Liggesmeyer). Find Fandango at https://fandango-fuzzer.github.io/
#Fandango 1.1 is now available! With this release, #Fandango becomes a full-fledged _protocol fuzzer_, happily exploring states and messages of protocols such as FTP or DNS. Thanks to José Antonio Zamudio Amaya. Valentin Huber, Alexander Liggesmeyer, and Marius Smytzek for their hard work!
Find Fandango at https://fandango-fuzzer.github.io/
For decades, my mission was to help developers build better software. Now I help anyone, including AI: https://andreas-zeller.info
"Should Computer Scientists Experiment Less?" This is the title of my upcoming Harlan D. Mills Award Talk at ICSE 2026 on the past, present, and future of Software Engineering research. Looking forward to lots of productive discussions!
https://conf.researchr.org/details/icse-2026/icse-2026-main-plenaries/8/IEEE-Computer-Society-Harlan-D-Mills-Award-and-Talk-by-Andreas-Zeller-Should-Comput
With more and more AI-generated code, comprehensive system testing becomes more important than ever. Our new paper "Language-Based Protocol Testing" (with Alexander Liggesmeyer and Pepe Zamudio), shows how to specify and test all details of how programs interact. Implemented as part of #Fandango! https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.20308
On my way to Savannah, Georgia to an IFIP WG 4.3 meeting, where I’ll present our work on Parameterized Compiler Testing (a joint work with my fantastic co-workers Addison Crump and Alexi Turcotte)
When formatted as a PDF, @TheFuzzingBook@mastodon.social now has 1,477 pages
