The core research interest of ICET-lab is in software engineering for distributed, Web, and cloud-based systems. The overarching goal of the team is to understand how developers use emerging Internet technology, and to support the community in using these technologies effectively. Many of our studies have an empirical slant (e.g., we crawl open source repositories, send out surveys, or conduct interviews), but we also frequently conduct experimental research (e.g., controlled lab experiments, field studies, or performance evaluations). We are also keen on building proof-of-concepts and tools. We are commited to open and reproducible science, as well as to transferring our results to industry and society as a whole. As part of this, we often speak about our work at academic and industrial conferences.

Virtually all our papers are available freely via the green open access model. If you cannot find a specific paper you are always free to email the authors, we will happily provide a (text-identical) preprint version.

ICET-lab currently receives financial support from the Wallenberg AI, Autonomous Systems, and Software Programme (WASP), the ICT Area of Advance at Chalmers, the Swedish Research Council (VR), and Sweden’s innovation agency Vinnova. Past research was sponsored by the EU H2020 research programme and the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNF).

Below you can find a small selection of our recent papers. The full list is available here.

Empirical Results in Cloud-Based SE

Linda Erlenhov, Francisco Gomes de Oliveira Neto, Philipp Leitner. An Empirical Study of Bots in Software Development – Characteristics and Challenges from a Practitioner’s Perspective. In ESEC/FSE’20. (paper to appear) Philipp Leitner, Erik Wittern, Josef Spillner, and Waldemar Hummer. 2018. A Mixed-Method Empirical Study of Function-as-a-Service Software Development in Industrial Practice. Journal of Systems and Software, Volume 149, March 2019, Pages 340-359 (paper) Jürgen Cito, Philipp Leitner, Thomas Fritz, and Harald C. Gall. 2015. The making of cloud applications: an empirical study on software development for the cloud. In ESEC/FSE’15 (paper)

Java Performance Testing and JMH

Christoph Laaber, Stefan Würsten, Harald C. Gall, Philipp Leitner. Dynamically Reconfiguring Software Microbenchmarks: Reducing Execution Time Without Sacrificing Result Quality. In ESEC/FSE’20 (paper to appear) Diego Costa, Cor-Paul Bezemer, Philipp Leitner, Artur Andrzejak. What’s Wrong With My Benchmark Results? Studying Bad Practices in JMH Benchmarks. In IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE). (paper to appear)

Cloud Benchmarking

Philipp Leitner and Jürgen Cito. 2016. Patterns in the Chaos—A Study of Performance Variation and Predictability in Public IaaS Clouds. ACM Trans. Internet Technol. 16, 3, Article 15 (April 2016), 23 pages. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2885497 (note: the official ACM version of this paper is completely botched – please refer to the arXiv version instead) Philipp Leitner and Joel Scheuner. 2015. Bursting with Possibilities – An Empirical Study of Credit-Based Bursting Cloud Instance Types. IEEE/ACM 8th International Conference on Utility and Cloud Computing (UCC), pp. 227-236. (paper)

Tools for Building Cloud Applications

Jürgen Cito, Philipp Leitner, Martin Rinard, Harald Gall (2019). Interactive Production Performance Feedback in the IDE. In  ICSE’2019, pp. 971–981. (paper) Gerald Schermann, Dominik Schöni, Philipp Leitner, and Harald C. Gall Bifrost – Supporting Continuous Deployment with Automated Enactment of Multi-Phase Live Testing Strategies. In the 2016 ACM/IFIP/USENIX Middleware Conference. (paper)