computer science

PhD studentship

Teaching

CO7206: Systems Re-engineering

The module aims to teach students about the problems and issues associated with legacy software systems and the methods used in reverse engineering, understanding, maintaining, and reengineering them. Additionally, The module aims to help students to develop analytical and problem solving skills in dealing with legacy systems and software integration challenges and to develop hands-on experience in reverse engineering and reengineering existing software systems. Further information can be obtained from the course webpage.

CO7201: Masters Dissertation Project

I am a convenor of the MSc. Dissertation project, together with Nir Piterman. Further information can be obtained from the course webpage.

Some opinions (or rights?) that I agree with.

Research

My research revolves around the development of techniques and tools to verify and validate the behaviour of software systems. More specifically, I develop techniques to reverse-engineer useful models for the purposes of documentation and testing, by combining static and dynamic software analysis techniques with machine learning algorithms.

I completed my Ph.D. in 2006 as a member of the software engineering group (now SoSyg), at the department of Computer and Information Sciences, at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. This was concerned with the development of static analysis tools to assist with the manual inspection of object-oriented software systems.

Before coming to Leicester in 2010, I spent five years as a postdoctoral researcher with the Verification and Testing group, in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Sheffield.

Recent Program Committees

• The International Conference on Software Maintenance Early Research Achievements track (ICSM-ERA 2012), Trento, Italy
• The 7th International Workshop on the Automation of Software Test (AST 2012), Zurich, Switzerland, 2012 (co-located with ICSE 2012)
• Regression 2012, Quebec, Canada (co-located with ICST 2012)
• The IEEE International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC 2011)
• RefTest 2011, Berlin
• International Workshop on Dynamic Analysis (WODA) 2011, Toronto
• The IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (Tools track) 2011, Kansas

Research Projects

• DSTL BATS project (Building Adequate Test Sets by Reverse Engineering) - Investigator, commencing in 2012)
• EU FP7 MEALS project - Collaborator, commencing in 2012
• EPSRC REGI project (EP/F065825/1) - Recognised Researcher (employed as researcher 2009-2010)
• EPSRC STAMINA project (EP/H002456/1) - CI / Recognised Researcher (2009 -)
• EU FP7 ProTest project - Collaborator (2008-2009)
• EPSRC AutoAbstract project - Research Assistant (finished 2008)

Publications

Please contact me for further information on any of these publications.

To appear

N. Walkinshaw, B. Lambeau, C. Damas, K. Bogdanov, P. Dupont
STAMINA: A Competition to Encourage the Development and Assessment of Software Model Inference Techniques
Journal of Empirical Software Engineering

N. Walkinshaw, K. Bogdanov
Automated Comparison of State-Based Software Models in terms of their Language and Structure
ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology

2012

G. Fraser, N. Walkinshaw
Behaviourally Adequate Software Testing
Proceedings of the 2012 International Conference on Software Testing (ICST 2012)
Montreal, Canada, to appear

2011

N. Walkinshaw
Assessing Test Adequacy for Black-Box Systems Without Specifications
Proceedings of the 2011 23rd IFIP International Conference on Testing Software and Systems (ICTSS 2011)
Paris, France, November 2011

N. Walkinshaw, K. Bogdanov
Adapting Grammar Inference Techniques to Mine State Machines (Chapter),
Mining Software Specifications: Methodologies and Applications
D. Lo, S-C. Khoo, J. Han, and C. Liu (Eds),
Chapman Hall / CRC, Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery Series, 2011

S. Adra, M. Kiran, P. McMinn, N. Walkinshaw
A Multiobjective Optimisation Approach for Dynamic Inference and Refinement of Agent-Based Model Specifications
Proceedings of the 2011 IEEE Congress on Evolutionary Computation (CEC 2011)
New Orleans, USA, June 2011

2010

N. Walkinshaw, K. Bogdanov, J. Derrick, J. Paris
Increasing Functional Coverage by Inductive Testing: A Case Study
Proceedings of the 22nd IFIP International Conference on Testing Software and Systems (ICTSS 2010)
Natal, Brazil, November 2010

N. Walkinshaw
The Practical Assessment of Test Sets with Inductive Inference
Proceedings of Testing Academia & Industrial Conference (TAIC PART'10),
Windsor, UK, August, 2010

N. Walkinshaw, K. Bogdanov, C. Damas, B. Lambeau, P. Dupont
A Framework for the Competitive Evaluation of Model Inference Techniques
Proceedings of the International Workshop on Model Inference in Testing (MIIT 2010)
Trento, Italy, July 2010

N. Walkinshaw, S. Afshan, P. McMinn
Using Compression Algorithms to Support the Comprehension of Program Traces
Proceedings of the International Workshop on Dynamic Analysis (WODA 2010)
Trento, Italy, July 2010

M. Hall, P. McMinn, N. Walkinshaw
Superstate Identification for State Machines Using Search-Based Clustering
Proceedings of the Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO 2010)
Portland, USA, July 2010

S. Afshan, P. McMinn, N. Walkinshaw
Using Dictionary Compression Algorithms to Identify Phases in Program Traces
Technical Report CS-10-01
Department of Computer Science
The University of Sheffield, January, 2010

2009

K. Bogdanov, N. Walkinshaw
Computing the Structural Difference between State-Based Models
16th IEEE Working Conference on Reverse Engineering (WCRE 2009)
Lille, France, October 2009

N. Walkinshaw, J. Derrick
Incrementally Discovering Testable Specifications from Program Executions
Proceedings for Formal Methods for Components and Objects (FMCO'09), Springer LNCS(6286)
Eindhoven, Netherlands, November 2009

N. Walkinshaw, J. Derrick, Q. Guo
Iterative Refinement of Reverse-Engineered Models by Model-Based Testing
16th International Symposium on Formal Methods (FM 2009), Springer LNCS(5850)
Eindhoven, Netherlands, November 2009

Q. Guo, J. Derrick, N. Walkinshaw
Applying Testability Transformations to Achieve Structural Coverage of Erlang Programs
21st IFIP International Conference on Testing of Communicating Systems (TestCom 2009), Springer LNCS(5826)
Eindhoven, Netherlands, November 2009

2008

N. Walkinshaw, K. Bogdanov, M. Holcombe, S. Salahuddin
Improving Dynamic Software Analysis by Applying Grammar Inference Principles
Journal of Software Maintenance and Evolution, 20(4), pp.269-290, 2008

M.Kiran, S. Coakley, N. Walkinshaw, P. McMinn, M. Holcombe
Validation and Discovery from Computational Biology Model
BioSystems, 93(2008), pp. 141-150, 2008

N. Walkinshaw, K.Bogdanov, S. Ali, M. Holcombe
Automated Discovery of State Transitions and their Functions in Source Code
Software Testing, Verification and Reliability vol. 18, pp. 99-121, 2008

N. Walkinshaw, K.Bogdanov, K. Johnson
Evaluation and Comparison of Inferred Regular Grammars
9th International Colloquium on Grammar Inference (ICGI'08), Springer LNAI(5278)
St. Malo, France, September 2008

N. Walkinshaw, K.Bogdanov
Inferring Finite-State Models with Temporal Constraints
23rd IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE'08)
L'Aquila, Italy, September 2008

2007

N. Walkinshaw, K.Bogdanov, M. Holcombe, S. Salahuddin
Reverse-Engineering State Machines by Interactive Grammar Inference
14th IEEE Working Conference on Reverse Engineering (WCRE'07)
Vancouver, Canada, October 2007

N. Walkinshaw, M. Roper, M. Wood
Feature Location and Extraction using Landmarks and Barriers
23rd IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance (ICSM'07)
Paris, France, October 2007

F. Bernardini, M. Gheorghe, F. Romero-Campero, N. Walkinshaw
A Hybrid Approach to Modelling Biological Systems
8th Workshop on Membrane Computing, Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science 4860/2007,
Thessaloniki, Greece, June 2007

N. Walkinshaw, K. Bogdanov
Applying Grammar Inference Principles to Dynamic Analysis
Program Comprehension and Dynamic Analysis (PCODA'07),
Vancouver, 2007

S. Ali, K. Bogdanov, N. Walkinshaw
A Comparative Study of Methods for Dynamic Reverse-Engineering of State Models
Technical Report CS-07-16
Department of Computer Science
The University of Sheffield, October, 2007

2006

N. Walkinshaw, K. Bogdanov, M. Holcombe
Identifying State Transitions and their Functions in Source Code
1st IEEE Testing Academia & Industrial Conference (TAIC PART'06),
Windsor, UK, August, 2006

Neil Walkinshaw
Partitioning Object-Oriented Software for Inspections
PhD. Thesis, The University of Strathclyde,
June 2006.

2005

N. Walkinshaw, M. Roper, M. Wood
Understanding Object-Oriented Source Code from the Behavioral Perspective
13th IEEE International Workshop on Program Comprehension (IWPC'05)
St. Louis, USA, May 2005

N. Walkinshaw, M. Roper, M. Wood
Collecting and Categorising Faults in Object-Oriented Code
UKTest 2005,
Sheffield, September 2005

D. Kirk, M. Roper, N. Walkinshaw
Attribute Slicing
Dagstuhl Slicing Seminar Report
November 2005.

N. Walkinshaw, M. Roper and M. Wood
Extracting User-Level Functions from Object-Oriented Code
the ECOOP Workshop on Object-Oriented Reengineering (WOOR'05),
Glasgow, July 2005

Serge Demeyer, Kim Mens, Roel Wuyts, Yann-Gaël Guéhéneuc, Andy Zaidman, Neil Walkinshaw, Ademar Aguiar, and Stéphane Ducasse
Report of the 6th international Workshop on Object-Oriented Reengineering
July 2005

N. Walkinshaw
Inspecting Object-Oriented Code from the Behavioural Perspective
Doctoral Symposium Abstract
ECOOP Doctoral Symposium, Glasgow, July 2005

2003

N. Walkinshaw, M. Roper, M. Wood
The Java System Dependence Graph
3rd IEEE International Workshop on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation (SCAM'03),
Amsterdam, Netherlands, September 2003

Author: Neil Walkinshaw (n.walkinshaw@mcs.le.ac.uk), T: +44 (0)116 252 3953.
© University of Leicester October, 2010. Last modified: 24th April 2012, 14:35:05.
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