Ensuring the quality of software systems through testing is essential, yet maintaining test cases poses significant challenges. The need for frequent updates to align with the evolving system under test often entails high complexity and cost for maintaining these test cases. Further, unrepaired broken test cases can degrade test suite quality and disrupt the software development process, wasting developers’ time. In addition, flaky tests are problematic because they non-deterministically pass or fail for the same software version under test, causing confusion and wasting development effort. In this presentation, I will report on recent work using language models to help automate test repair and will reflect on current results, limitations, and future work.

Lionel C. Briand is professor of software engineering and has shared appointments between (1) The University of Ottawa, Canada and (2) The Lero Centre, University of Limerick, Ireland. In collaboration with colleagues, over 25 years, he has run many collaborative research projects with companies in the automotive, satellite, aerospace, energy, financial, and legal domains. Lionel has held various engineering, academic, and leading positions in seven countries. He currently holds a Canada Research Chair (Tier 1) on “Intelligent Software Dependability and Compliance” and is the director of Lero, the national Irish centre on software research.

Lionel was elevated to the grades of IEEE Fellow and ACM Fellow for his work on software testing and verification. He was granted the IEEE Computer Society Harlan Mills award, the ACM SIGSOFT outstanding research award, and the IEEE Reliability Society engineer-of-the-year award, respectively in 2012, 2022, and 2013. He further received an ERC Advanced grant in 2016 on the topic of modelling and testing cyber-physical systems, the most prestigious individual research award in the European Union, and was elected a fellow of the Academy of Science, Royal Sociey of Canada in 2023.