ISSTA 2025
Wed 25 - Sat 28 June 2025 Trondheim, Norway
co-located with FSE 2025

About

The ISSTA/FSE 2025 Joint Doctoral Symposium will bring together doctoral students working in software engineering and allow them to present and discuss their research goals, methods, and results in a constructive and international atmosphere.

The goals of the Doctoral Symposium are to:

  • Provide the participants with independent and constructive feedback on their current research and future research directions;
  • Develop a supportive community of scholars and a spirit of collaborative research;
  • Provide an opportunity for student participants to interact with established researchers and practitioners in the software engineering community

Participating students will have the unique opportunity to describe their research ideas and receive comments and suggestions from experienced software engineering researchers.

Plenary
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Wed 25 Jun

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10:30 - 11:00
Coffee BreakCatering at Foyer
10:30
30m
Coffee break
Break
Catering

11:00 - 12:30
Doctoral SymposiumDoctoral Symposium at Andromeda
11:00
15m
Day opening
Opening Remarks
Doctoral Symposium
C: Andreas Zeller CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security, C: Darko Marinov University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, C: Jie M. Zhang King's College London, C: Federica Sarro University College London
11:15
45m
Keynote
Research and Impact in Academia and Industry
Doctoral Symposium
Mark Harman Meta Platforms, Inc. and UCL
12:00
15m
Talk
Job Talk #1: Search-based Software Testing Driven by Domain Knowledge
Doctoral Symposium
A: Federico Formica McMaster University
12:15
15m
Talk
Job Talk #2: Regression Fault Detection and Mitigation in the Evolution of Deep Learning Systems
Doctoral Symposium
A: Hanmo You Tianjin University
12:30 - 14:00
Lunch BreakCatering at Foyer
12:30
90m
Lunch
Lunch
Catering

14:00 - 15:30
Doctoral SymposiumDoctoral Symposium at Andromeda

Lightning talks and poster session

14:00
90m
Doctoral symposium paper
On the Brittleness of Legacy Web UI Testing: A Pragmatic Perspective
Doctoral Symposium
Haonan Zhang University of Waterloo
14:00
90m
Doctoral symposium paper
Fine-Grained Developer Reification
Doctoral Symposium
A: Stefano Campanella REVEAL @ Software Institute - USI, Lugano, Switzerland
14:00
90m
Doctoral symposium paper
When Performance Failure Occurs in Low-Latency Storage Systems: Observation, Prediction, and Solutions
Doctoral Symposium
A: Linxiao Bai National University of Defense Technology
14:00
90m
Doctoral symposium paper
Towards Privacy-Preserving Code Generation: Understanding and Mitigating Memorization in Code Large Language Models
Doctoral Symposium
A: Melih Catal University of Zurich
14:00
90m
Doctoral symposium paper
Mediating between Human Programmers and Integrated Development Environments using LLM-based Agents
Doctoral Symposium
A: Ziyou Li Delft University of Technology
14:00
90m
Doctoral symposium paper
Investigating the Role of Formal Verification in Software Development: From Automatic Specification Generation to Usability of Verification Languages
Doctoral Symposium
A: Tina Masoudi PhD student
14:00
90m
Doctoral symposium paper
Automated Vulnerability-Focused Code Reviews
Doctoral Symposium
Leonardo Centellas Computer Science Department, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile
14:00
90m
Doctoral symposium paper
Co-Intelligence in Software Engineering: Understanding and Optimizing GenAI Integration in Software Engineering for Skill Development in Time-Constrained Programming
Doctoral Symposium
Omkar Joshi Indian Institute of Technology Bombay
14:00
90m
Doctoral symposium paper
Formal Liability Apportionment in Autonomous Systems
Doctoral Symposium
Kaveh Aryan King's College London
14:00
90m
Doctoral symposium paper
Research Open-Source Software: supporting small communities with technical and social aspects
Doctoral Symposium
A: Lavinia Francesca Paganini Eindhoven University of Technology
14:00
90m
Doctoral symposium paper
Reversing Programs for Error Reachability Analysis
Doctoral Symposium
Adéla Štěpková Masaryk University
14:00
90m
Doctoral symposium paper
Towards More Interpretable Large Language Models for Code
Doctoral Symposium
A: Daniel Rodriguez-Cardenas William & Mary
14:00
90m
Doctoral symposium paper
Securing Language Models Against Vulnerability Encoding
Doctoral Symposium
Rui Melo University of Porto
14:00
90m
Doctoral symposium paper
Enhancing Large Language Model Integration in Integrated Development Environments
Doctoral Symposium
Daniele Cipollone Delft University of Technology, Netherlands
14:00
90m
Doctoral symposium paper
Generating Code Tours Using Locally-Runnable LLMs
Doctoral Symposium
A: Martin Balfroid University of Namur
14:00
90m
Doctoral symposium paper
End-to-End Testing Gamification: A Novel Approach to the Verification and Validation of Web and Mobile Applications
Doctoral Symposium
Lorenzo Laudadio Politecnico di Torino
14:00
90m
Doctoral symposium paper
Automating the conformity assessment of Cyber-Physical Systems software
Doctoral Symposium
Guillaume Nguyen University of Namur
15:30 - 16:00
Coffee BreakCatering at Foyer
15:30
30m
Coffee break
Break
Catering

16:00 - 18:00
Doctoral SymposiumDoctoral Symposium at Andromeda
16:00
60m
Live Q&A
Ask Me Anything
Doctoral Symposium

17:00
60m
Meeting
Break Out Sessions
Doctoral Symposium

Accepted Papers

Title
Ask Me Anything
Doctoral Symposium

Automated Vulnerability-Focused Code Reviews
Doctoral Symposium
Automating the conformity assessment of Cyber-Physical Systems software
Doctoral Symposium
Break Out Sessions
Doctoral Symposium

Co-Intelligence in Software Engineering: Understanding and Optimizing GenAI Integration in Software Engineering for Skill Development in Time-Constrained Programming
Doctoral Symposium
End-to-End Testing Gamification: A Novel Approach to the Verification and Validation of Web and Mobile Applications
Doctoral Symposium
Enhancing Large Language Model Integration in Integrated Development Environments
Doctoral Symposium
Fine-Grained Developer Reification
Doctoral Symposium
Formal Liability Apportionment in Autonomous Systems
Doctoral Symposium
Generating Code Tours Using Locally-Runnable LLMs
Doctoral Symposium
Investigating the Role of Formal Verification in Software Development: From Automatic Specification Generation to Usability of Verification Languages
Doctoral Symposium
Job Talk #1: Search-based Software Testing Driven by Domain Knowledge
Doctoral Symposium
Job Talk #2: Regression Fault Detection and Mitigation in the Evolution of Deep Learning Systems
Doctoral Symposium
Mediating between Human Programmers and Integrated Development Environments using LLM-based Agents
Doctoral Symposium
On the Brittleness of Legacy Web UI Testing: A Pragmatic Perspective
Doctoral Symposium
Opening Remarks
Doctoral Symposium
Research and Impact in Academia and Industry
Doctoral Symposium
Research Open-Source Software: supporting small communities with technical and social aspects
Doctoral Symposium
Reversing Programs for Error Reachability Analysis
Doctoral Symposium
Securing Language Models Against Vulnerability Encoding
Doctoral Symposium
Towards More Interpretable Large Language Models for Code
Doctoral Symposium
Towards Privacy-Preserving Code Generation: Understanding and Mitigating Memorization in Code Large Language Models
Doctoral Symposium
When Performance Failure Occurs in Low-Latency Storage Systems: Observation, Prediction, and Solutions
Doctoral Symposium

Call for Papers

About

The ISSTA/FSE 2025 Joint Doctoral Symposium will bring together doctoral students working in software engineering and allow them to present and discuss their research goals, methods, and results in a constructive and international atmosphere.

The goals of the Doctoral Symposium are to:

  • Provide the participants with independent and constructive feedback on their current research and future research directions;
  • Develop a supportive community of scholars and a spirit of collaborative research;
  • Provide an opportunity for student participants to interact with established researchers and practitioners in the software engineering community

Participating students will have the unique opportunity to describe their research ideas and receive comments and suggestions from experienced software engineering researchers.

Important Dates

All dates are 23:59:59 AoE (UTC-12h).

  • Submission Deadline: February 24, 2025
  • Notification: April 10, 2025
  • Camera-Ready Version: April 24, 2025
  • Doctoral Symposium: during conference week

Submissions

To apply as a student participating in the Doctoral Symposium, you must prepare a research proposal. We distinguish three submission categories: Starter, Consolidator, and Advanced.

Starter Submissions

Starter submissions (two pages) are for students who have not yet developed their dissertation topic and are seeking feedback on research progress to date. Starter submissions should focus on:

  • The research problem or area you are targeting and its importance to the field;
  • A brief survey of the background and related work

Consolidator Submissions

Consolidator submissions (four pages) are for students who have developed a research proposal with first results and are seeking feedback toward the successful completion of their thesis and defense. In addition to the topics for starter submissions, consolidator submissions are also expected to contain:

  • A description of the proposed approach;
  • The expected contributions of your research;
  • An evaluation plan for the stated contributions;
  • Any results achieved so far

Advanced Submissions

Advanced submissions (two pages) are for students about to complete their PhD thesis and prepare to apply for research positions. Accepted authors will be invited to present their job application talk and get feedback. In addition to the topics for starter submissions, advanced submissions are also expected to contain:

  • The central contributions of your research;
  • Evidence for the stated contributions;
  • (Possible) impact and relevance of your work;
  • Research plans after the PhD

How to Prepare your Submission

At the time of submission, all papers must conform to the FSE 2025 Format and Submission Guidelines (but they should not be anonymized), and must not exceed two pages (starter, advanced) or four pages (consolidator) including all text, references, and figures; submissions that do not comply with these requirements will be rejected by the chairs without review.

Your submission must be single-authored and include the title of your research, your name, your advisor (if you have one), your email address, and a short summary in the style of an abstract for a regular paper.

Starter and Consolidator submissions whose authors opt in for publication (see below) must be original work, not previously published, and not under consideration for publication elsewhere (see also ACM policy and procedures concerning plagiarism).

How to Submit

A submission consists of two documents in a single PDF file:

  1. Your research proposal as described above;
  2. A signed letter by your PhD advisor stating:
  • Your current status and progress towards a PhD;
  • That they are aware of your submission;
  • That they will attend at least one rehearsal of your presentation before the symposium.

PhD advisors who want to share confidential comments are welcome to e-mail the chairs, Federica Sarro (f.sarro@ucl.ac.uk), Andreas Zeller (zeller@cispa.de), Jie M. Zhang (jie.zhang@kcl.ac.uk), and Darko Marinov (marinov@illinois.edu).

Merge these two into a single PDF and submit it via the submission website (https://isstafse2025-ds.hotcrp.com).

The PDF must be received by the submission deadline.

Evaluation

The Doctoral Symposium chairs will select participants using the following criteria:

  • Quality of the research proposal and its relevance to ISSTA and FSE;
  • Quality of the proposal presentation

Attending

All authors of accepted submissions must register for the ISSTA/FSE 2025 Doctoral Symposium and present their work there as a poster and a lighting talk. Starter and Consolidator authors may also opt in to publish their submission in a companion volume to the ISSTA 2025 or FSE 2025 Conference Proceedings.

In addition, a subset of Starter and Consolidator authors will be invited to present their work in a short talk with discussion and feedback, and a subset of Advanced authors will be invited to give a brief job application talk with discussion and feedback.

Invited Speakers

TBA

Program

TBA

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