FSE 2026
Sun 5 - Thu 9 July 2026 Montreal, Canada
Mon 6 Jul 2026 09:39 - 09:45 at MB 3.210 - Opening and Lightning talks
Mon 6 Jul 2026 12:15 - 12:30 at MB 3.210 - Talks (Session 1)

Communication protocols involve stateful interactions between multiple parties, which makes systematic testing of their implementations challenging. Test inputs are not single messages, but sequences of syntactically and semantically dependent exchanges whose validity depends on prior communication and protocol state. This work proposes a protocol testing approach that systematically explores a protocol specification. We extend the specification format of FANDANGO such that it is able to specify protocol state, syntax, and semantics within a single file. The format combines context-free grammars with Turing-complete constraints and role-annotated nonterminals to describe multi-party behavior and cross-message dependencies. Specifications are role-neutral and can be applied to any participant in the protocol. We applied our technique to DNS, SMTP, FTP, a REST-style API, and a ChatGPT interaction grammar. Initial results show that our approach is able to drive communication with a system under test and that the k-path-guided exploration technique quickly achieves coverage across grammar structure, inputs, outputs, and protocol state.

Presentation (Presentation.pdf)4.34MiB
Testing Protocols with Formal Languages (DS-Testing-Protocols-with-Formal-Languages.pdf)639KiB

Mon 6 Jul

Displayed time zone: Eastern Time (US & Canada) change

09:00 - 10:30
Opening and Lightning talksDoctoral Symposium at MB 3.210
09:00
30m
Day opening
Opening
Doctoral Symposium
Cristian Cadar Imperial College London, Gail Murphy University of British Columbia
09:30
3m
Talk
Unsupervised Extraction of Latent Structures in Software Operations Data
Doctoral Symposium
Qiaolin Qin Polytechnique Montréal
09:33
3m
Talk
Towards Efficient and Secure Pull-Request-Based Software Development
Doctoral Symposium
Kazi Amit Hasan Queen's University, Canada
09:36
3m
Talk
Malleable Interfaces for Reviewing Software Documentation
Doctoral Symposium
Avinash Bhat McGill University
09:39
6m
Talk
Testing Protocols with Formal Languages
Doctoral Symposium
Alexander Liggesmeyer CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security
File Attached
09:45
2m
Talk
Towards Trustworthy AI-Enabled Systems: From Model-Level Reliability to Systemic Assurance
Doctoral Symposium
Yuheng Huang The University of Tokyo
09:47
3m
Talk
Awareness and Avoidance of Security Vulnerabilities in Software Tutorials
Doctoral Symposium
Bhagya Chembakottu McGill University
09:50
3m
Talk
Agentic Software Engineering Through Image-Based Multimodal Communications
Doctoral Symposium
Xuchen Tan York University
09:53
3m
Talk
Toward Scalable Automated Repository-Level Datasets for Software Vulnerability Detection
Doctoral Symposium
Amine LBATH Université Grenoble Alpes
09:56
6m
Talk
Toward Reliable Oracle Verification of Quantum Programs Under Noise and Resource Constraints
Doctoral Symposium
10:02
3m
Talk
From Deterministic Pipelines to Layered Automation: The Evolution of GitHub Actions in CI/CD
Doctoral Symposium
Elmira Onagh York University
10:05
3m
Talk
From Syntactic Mimicry to Semantic Correctness: Behavioral Understanding in LLM Code Generation
Doctoral Symposium
Ajmain Inqiad Alam University of Saskatchewan
10:08
3m
Talk
When Testing Meets Refactoring
Doctoral Symposium
Victor Guerra Veloso Concordia University
10:11
6m
Talk
From Helpful to Trustworthy: LLM Agents for Pair Programming
Doctoral Symposium
Ragib Shahariar Ayon Texas State University
10:17
3m
Talk
Automated Diagnosis and Testing of Game Compatibility Layers
Doctoral Symposium
Hanzheng Dai University of Alberta
10:20
3m
Talk
Reliable and Developer-Aligned Evaluation of Agents for Software Engineering
Doctoral Symposium
Răzvan Mihai Popescu Delft University of Technology
10:23
3m
Talk
Towards AI-Powered Localization of Software Bugs: From Semantic Understanding to Agentic Cognition
Doctoral Symposium
Asif Mohammed Samir Dalhousie University
10:26
3m
Talk
Democratizing Legal Requirements for Context-Aware Software Systems
Doctoral Symposium
Sophia Jit University of Toronto