ICSE 2026
Sun 12 - Sat 18 April 2026 Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
Mon 13 Apr 2026 17:10 - 17:25 at Bora Bora IV - Bots and Chatbots

Bias in AI systems can lead to unfair and discriminatory outcomes, especially when left untested before deployment. Although fairness testing aims to identify and mitigate such bias, existing tools are often difficult to use, requiring advanced expertise and offering limited support for real-world workflows. To address this, we introduce Bita, a conversational assistant designed to help software testers detect potential sources of bias, evaluate test plans through a fairness lens, and generate fairness-oriented exploratory testing charters. Bita integrates a large language model with retrieval-augmented generation, grounding its responses in curated fairness literature. Our validation demonstrates how Bita supports fairness testing tasks on real-world AI systems, providing structured, reproducible evidence of its utility. In summary, our work contributes a practical tool that operationalizes fairness testing in a way that is accessible, systematic, and directly applicable to industrial practice.

Mon 13 Apr

Displayed time zone: Brasilia, Distrito Federal, Brazil change

16:00 - 17:25
Bots and ChatbotsBoatSE at Bora Bora IV
16:00
40m
Keynote
Keynote speech — The Fall-Off of Bots in Software Engineering
BoatSE

16:40
15m
Talk
Reconsidering Conversational Norms in LLM Chatbots for Sustainable AI
BoatSE
Ronnie de Souza Santos University of Calgary, Cleyton Magalhaes Universidade Federal Rural de Pernambuco, Italo Santos University of Hawai‘i at Mānoa
Pre-print
16:55
15m
Talk
Patterns of Bot Participation and Emotional Influence in Open Source Development
BoatSE
Matteo Vaccargiu University of Cagliari, Riccardo Lai University of Cagliari, Maria Ilaria Lunesu Università degli studi di Cagliari, Andrea Pinna University of Cagliari, Giuseppe Destefanis University College London
17:10
15m
Talk
Bita: A Conversational Assistant for Fairness Testing
BoatSE
Keeryn Johnson University of Calgary, Cleyton Magalhaes Universidade Federal Rural de Pernambuco, Ronnie de Souza Santos University of Calgary
Pre-print