FSE 2026
Sun 5 - Thu 9 July 2026 Montreal, Canada
Thu 9 Jul 2026 12:10 - 12:30 at MB 9A - Release Engineering Chair(s): Nikolaos Tsantalis

Containerization has become a cornerstone of modern software deployment, yet many projects still ship single-stage Dockerfiles that bundle compilers, build tools, and temporary files into production images, thereby hurting performance and security. Multi-stage builds are recommended, yet uptake appears uneven, plausibly because refactoring legacy Dockerfiles demands nontrivial reasoning about build lifecycles and dependency separation. This paper presents \tool, an automated refactoring approach that converts single-stage Dockerfiles into optimized multi-stage builds. \tool first performs static analysis to identify the technology stack and to infer build-time and runtime dependencies. It then applies a lightweight gate that estimates refactoring benefit from a composite of image bloat, structural inefficiency, and security risk, proceeding only when refactoring is warranted. Finally, it synthesizes a multi-stage Dockerfile that isolates build tooling, copies only the artifacts needed at runtime, and applies production hardening. Evaluated on 521 real-world single-stage projects, \tool successfully produced working multi-stage Dockerfiles for 60.3% of targets. The resulting images were, on average, 52.2% smaller and contained 50.0% fewer high-risk vulnerabilities than the originals, outperforming baselines. \tool lowers the barrier to multi-stage adoption at scale, yielding leaner images with reduced attack surface and improved maintainability. We release the tool, its knowledge assets, and the evaluation dataset to support reproducibility and future research.

Thu 9 Jul

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

10:30 - 12:30
10:30
20m
Talk
Towards semantic versioning of open pre-trained language model releases on hugging face
Journal-First Paper
Adekunle Ajibode Queen's University, Abdul Ali Bangash Queen's University, Filipe Roseiro Cogo Centre for Software Excellence, Huawei Canada, Bram Adams Queen's University, Ahmed E. Hassan Queen’s University
10:50
20m
Talk
Causes and Canonicalization of Unreproducible Builds in Java
Journal-First Paper
Aman Sharma KTH Royal Institute of Technology, Benoit Baudry Université de Montréal, Martin Monperrus KTH Royal Institute of Technology
Link to publication Pre-print
11:10
10m
Talk
A Vision for Context-Aware CI Adoption Decisions
Ideas, Visions and Reflections
Osamah Alaini Trent University, Taher A. Ghaleb Trent University
11:20
20m
Talk
Deployability-Centric Infrastructure-as-Code Generation: Fail, Learn, Refine, and Succeed through LLM-Empowered DevOps Simulation
Research Papers
Tianyi Zhang Australian National University, Shidong pan New York University, zejun zhang Nanjing University, Zhenchang Xing CSIRO's Data61, xiaoyu sun The Australian National University
Pre-print
11:40
10m
Talk
Treating Run-time Execution History as a First-Class Citizen: Co-Versioning Run-time Behavior alongside Code
Ideas, Visions and Reflections
Marcus Kessel University of Mannheim
11:50
20m
Talk
Autonomous Refactoring for Perfective Maintenance at Scale: The Agentic RACER System and its Empirical Evaluations
Industry Papers
Audris Mockus University of Tennessee, Arjun Singh Banga Meta, Payal Bhuptani Meta, Sky Jazayeri Meta, Jun Ge Meta Platforms, Inc., Gurinder Grewal Meta, Emma Lai Meta, Jianmin Li Meta, Feng Liang Meta, Rishab Mangla Meta, Vishal Parekh Meta, Sergey Parshin Meta, Peter C Rigby Meta / Concordia University, Gursharan Singh Meta Platforms, Inc., Matt Steiner Meta Platforms, Inc., Nachiappan Nagappan Meta Platforms, Inc.
12:10
20m
Talk
Automating Dockerfile Refactoring to Multi-Stage Builds
Research Papers
Dongjin Chen Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Wenhua Yang Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Minxue Pan Nanjing University, Yu Zhou Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics