Alessandra Gorla, PhD

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Alessandra Gorla

I am an associate research professor at the IMDEA Software Institute in Madrid, Spain. Prior to that, I have been working as a postdoc with Andreas Zeller at the Software Engineering chair at Saarland University in Germany, and a visiting researcher at Google in Mountain View.
I obtained my PhD in the STAR group, led by Mauro Pezzè at the Università della Svizzera italiana in Lugano, Switzerland. My research interests are in the analysis of mobile applications, and software test automation.

This is my CV

INFO I am looking for motivated students interested in software engineering. Contact me for internship and PhD opportunities!

Analysis of Mobile Apps

We have done extensive work on the analysis of mobile app. We compared Android test input generation techniques in our ASE2015 paper. At ASE in 2025 this paper was awarded as the Most Infuential Paper
We developed several techniques to identify anomalous apps (ICSE2014, ICSE2015), apps that have privacy issues (PETS2020, MSR2020), and finally we analyzed the iOS ecosystem (FSE2023, SCAM2022)

Intrinsic Redundancy

We exploit the intrinsic redundancy of software to make Web and Java systems more resilient to failures. We exploited intrinsic software redundancy also to automatically produce test oracles. We also developed a search-based technique to automatically identify intrisically redundant methods in Java classes.
More information on FSE2010, ICSE2013, ICSE2014, FSE2014. JSS2021 FSE2024

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Publications

2025
[67]
Search-based Inference of Class Invariants (, , , and ), In GECCO'25: Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference, Malaga, Spain, July, 2025, Springer, . [pdf]
[66]
Search-based Inference of Class Invariants: How far can Simulated Annealing Take us? (, , , and ), In SSBSE 2025: Proceedings of the 17th International Symposium on Search-Based Software Engineering, Springer, . [pdf]
[65]
State Field Coverage: A Metric for Oracle Quality (, and ), In 40th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, ASE 2025, .
[64]
Test Oracle Automation in the Era of LLMs (, and ), In ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, volume 34, . [url] [doi]
2024
[63]
Improving Patch Correctness Analysis via Random Testing and Large Language Models (, and ), In IEEE Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation, ICST 2024, Toronto, ON, Canada, May 27-31, 2024, IEEE, . [url] [doi]
[62]
On the Analysis of Mobile Apps. Why is most of our Research on Android? (), In Proceedings of the 17th Innovations in Software Engineering Conference, ISEC 2024, Bangalore, India, February 22-24, 2024 (Sujit Kumar Charkrabarti, Raghavan Komondoor, Raveendra Kumar Medicherla, Aseem Rastogi, Sudipto Ghosh, eds.), ACM, . [url] [doi]
[61]
FixCheck: A Tool for Improving Patch Correctness Analysis (, and ), In Proceedings of the 33rd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis, ISSTA 2024, Vienna, Austria, September 16-20, 2024 (Maria Christakis, Michael Pradel, eds.), ACM, . [url] [doi]
[60]
Abstraction-Aware Inference of Metamorphic Relations (, , , , , , , and ), In Proc. ACM Softw. Eng., volume 1, . [pdf] [doi]
[59]
Precise Lazy Initialization for Programs with Complex Heap Inputs (, , , , and ), In ISSRE 2023: The 34th IEEE International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering, . [pdf]
2023
[58]
LibKit: Detecting Third-Party Libraries in iOS Apps (, , and ), In ESEC/FSE 2023: Proceedings of the 31st ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, ESEC/FSE 2023, . [pdf]
[57]
A Decade of Code Comment Quality Assessment: A Systematic Literature Review (, , , , and ), In Journal of Systems and Software, volume 195, . [pdf] [doi]
2022
[56]
ReChan: An Automated Analysis of Android App Release Notes to Report Inconsistencies (, and ), In MobileSoft 2019: Proceedings of the 9th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Mobile Software Engineering and Systems, . [pdf]
[55]
Use of Test Doubles in Android Testing: An In-Depth Investigation (, , , , , and ), In ICSE 2022: Proceedings of the 44th International Conference on Software Engineering, . [pdf]
[54]
Call Me Maybe: Using NLP to Automatically Generate Unit Test Cases Compliant with Temporal Constraints (, , and ), In 37th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, ASE 2022, .
[53]
On the Usage of Programming Languages in the iOS Ecosystem (, and ), In SCAM 2022: Proceedings of the 22nd IEEE International Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation, . [pdf]
[52]
LISSA: Lazy Initialization with Specialized Solver Aid (, , , and ), In ASE 2022: Proceedings of the 37th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, . [pdf]
2021
[51]
MeMo: Automatically identifying metamorphic relations in Javadoc comments for test automation (, , , and ), In Journal of Systems and Software, volume 181, . [pdf] [doi]
[50]
Replicomment: identifying clones in code comments (, , and ), In Journal of Systems and Software, volume 182, . [pdf] [doi]
[49]
An application of KLEE to aerospace industrial software (, , , and ), In XX Jornadas de Programación y Lenguajes (PROLE 2021), . [pdf]
[48]
An application of KLEE to aerospace industrial software (, , , and ), In 2nd International KLEE Workshop on Symbolic Execution, . [pdf]
2020
[47]
Automatically Granted Permissions in Android apps (, , and ), In MSR 2020: 17th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories, . [pdf]
[46]
A Framework for Automated Test Mocking of Mobile Apps (, and ), In ASE 2020: Proceedings of the 35th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, . [pdf]
[45]
Angel or Devil? A Privacy Study of Mobile Parental Control Apps (, , , and ), In The 20th Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PoPETs 2020.2), . [pdf]
[44]
Towards Detecting Inconsistent Comments in Java Source Code Automatically (, , and ), In SCAM 2020: Proceedings of the 20th IEEE International Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation, . [pdf]
2019
[43]
Release Practices for iOS and Android Apps ( and ), In WAMA 2019: Proceedings of the 3rd International Workshop on App Market Analytics, . [pdf]
[42]
Are you Sure They are the Same? Identifying Differences Between iOS and Android Implementations (, , and ), In Actas de las V Jornadas Nacionales de Ciberseguridad, .
2018
[41]
RepliComment: Identifying Clones in Code Comments ( and ), In ICPC 2018: Proceedings of the 26th IEEE International Conference on Program Comprehension, . [pdf]
[40]
What did Really Change with the new Release of the App? (, , and ), In MSR 2018: 15th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories, . [pdf]
[39]
Analyzing the User Interface of Android Apps (, , and ), In MobileSoft 2018: Proceedings of the 5th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Mobile Software Engineering and Systems, . [pdf]
[38]
A Study on the Privacy Implications of Mobile Parental Control Apps (, , , , and ), In Open Day for Privacy, Transparency and Decentralization (OPERANDI 2018), in conjunction with the 18th Privacy Enhancing Technologies Symposium (PETS 2018), .
[37]
Translating Code Comments to Procedure Specifications (, , , , , and ), In ISSTA 2018: Proceedings of the 27th International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis, . [pdf]
2017
[36]
Detecting Behavior Anomalies in Graphical User Interfaces (, , , , and ), In ICSE 2017: Proceedings of the 39th International Conference on Software Engineering Companion, . [pdf] [doi]
[35]
How Do Apps Evolve in Their Permission Requests? A Preliminary Study ( and ), In MSR 2017: 14th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories, IEEE Computer Society, . [pdf] [doi]
[34]
O!Snap: Cost-Efficient Testing in the Cloud (, and ), In ICST 2017: 10th International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation, IEEE Computer Society, . [pdf] [doi]
[33]
Intrinsic Redundancy for Reliability and Beyond (, , and ), Chapter in PAUSE: Present and Ulterior Software Engineering (Meyer, Bertrand, Mazzara, Manuel, eds.), Springer, . [pdf] [doi]
[32]
Software engineering for self-adaptive systems: research challenges in the provision of assurances (, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , and ), Chapter in Software Engineering for Self-Adaptive Systems III. Assurances, Springer-Verlag, volume 9640, . [pdf] [doi]
2016
[31]
CALAPPA: a Toolchain for Mining Android Applications (, , , , and ), In WAMA 2016: Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on App Market Analytics, ACM, . [pdf] [doi]
[30]
Automatic Generation of Oracles for Exceptional Behaviors (, , and ), In ISSTA 2016: Proceedings of the 2016 International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis, . [pdf] [doi]
[29]
Checking App User Interfaces Against App Descriptions (, , and ), In WAMA 2016: Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on App Market Analytics, ACM, . [pdf] [doi]
2015
[28]
Mining Apps for Abnormal Usage of Sensitive Data (, , , , , and ), In ICSE 2015: Proceedings of the 37th International Conference on Software Engineering, IEEE Press, . [pdf]
[27]
Intrinsic Software Redundancy for Self-healing Software Systems and Automated Oracle Generation (, , , , , and ), In Software Engineering & Management 2015, GI, . [pdf]
[26]
Automatic Workarounds: Exploiting the Intrinsic Redundancy of Web Applications (, , and ), In ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, volume 24, . [pdf] [doi]
2015
[25]
Automated Test Input Generation for Android: Are We There Yet? (, and ), In ASE 2015: Proceedings of the 30th Annual International Conference on Automated Software Engineering, IEEE Computer Society, . [pdf] [doi]
[24]
Mining Android Apps for Anomalies (, , , and ), Chapter in The Art and Science of Analyzing Software Data, Morgan Kaufmann, . [pdf]
[23]
Synthesis of Equivalent Method Calls in Guava (, and ), In SSBSE 2015: Proceedings of the 7th International Symposium on Search-Based Software Engineering, Springer, . [pdf]
2014
[22]
Search-based Security Testing of Web Applications (, and ), In SBST 2014: Proceedings of the 7th International Workshop on Search-Based Software Testing, . [pdf] [doi]
[21]
Cross-checking Oracles from Intrinsic Software Redundancy (, , , and ), In ICSE 2014: Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Software Engineering, . [pdf] [doi]
[20]
Search-Based Synthesis of Equivalent Method Sequences (, , , and ), In FSE 2014: Proceedings of the ACM SIGSOFT 22nd Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, . [pdf] [doi]
[19]
Checking App Behavior Against App Descriptions (, , and ), In ICSE 2014: Proceedings of the 36th International Conference on Software Engineering, . [pdf] [doi]
2013
[18]
Automatic Recovery from Runtime Failures (, , , and ), In ICSE 2013: Proceedings of the 35th International Conference on Software Engineering, . [pdf]
[17]
Software Engineering Processes for Self-adaptive Systems (, , , , , and ), Chapter in Software Engineering for Self-Adaptive Systems II, Springer-Verlag, volume 7475, . [pdf] [doi]
[16]
Software Engineering for Self-Adaptive Systems: A Second Research Roadmap (, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , and ), Chapter in Software Engineering for Self-Adaptive Systems II, Springer-Verlag, volume 7475, . [pdf] [doi]
[15]
Search-based data-flow test generation (, , and ), In ISSRE 2013: 24th International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering, . [pdf] [doi]
2012
[14]
A self-healing technique for Java applications (, , and ), In ICSE 2017: Proceedings of the 34th International Conference on Software Engineering Companion, IEEE, . [pdf] [doi]
2012
[13]
Traffic Routing for Evaluating Self-Adaptation (, , and ), In SEAMS 2012: Proceedings of the 7th International Symposium on Software Engineering for Adaptive and Self-Managing Systems, ACM, . [pdf] [doi]
2011
[12]
Automatic Workarounds: Exploiting the Intrinsic Redundancy of Software Systems (), PhD thesis, Università della Svizzera italiana (USI), . [pdf]
2010
[11]
RAW: runtime automatic workarounds (, , and ), In ICSE 2010: Proceedings of the 32nd International Conference on Software Engineering Companion, . [pdf] [doi]
[10]
Automatic Workarounds for Web Applications (, , and ), In FSE 2010: Proceedings of the ACM SIGSOFT 18th Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, . [pdf]
[9]
Achieving Cost-Effective Software Reliability Through Self-Healing (, , , and ), In Computing and Informatics, volume 29, . [pdf]
2009
[8]
DaTeC: Dataflow Testing of Java Classes (, and ), In ICSE 2009: Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Software Engineering Companion, ACM, . [pdf] [doi]
[7]
Handling Software Faults with Redundancy (, and ), Chapter in Architecting Dependable Systems VI (R. de Lemos, J.-C. Fabre, C. Gacek, F. Gadducci, M. H. ter Beek, eds.), Springer, . [pdf] [doi]
2008
[6]
Self-Healing by Means of Automatic Workarounds (, and ), In SEAMS 2008: Proceedings of the 2008 International Workshop on Software Engineering for Adaptive and Self-Managing Systems, ACM, . [pdf] [doi]
2008
[5]
Healing Web applications through automatic workarounds (, and ), In Software Tools for Technology Transfer, volume 10, . [pdf] [doi]
2008
[4]
Contextual Integration Testing of Classes (, and ), In FASE 2008: Fundamental Approaches to Software Engineering, . [pdf]
2008
[3]
Automatic Workarounds as Failure Recoveries (), In FSEDS 2008: Proceedings of the ACM SIGSOFT 16th Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering Doctoral Symposium, ACM, . [pdf] [doi]
2007
[2]
An Empirical Evaluation of Data Flow Testing of Java Classes (, and ), Technical report 2007/03, Università della Svizzera italiana (USI), . [pdf]
2007
[1]
Towards Design for Self-Healing (), In SOQUA 2007: Proceedings of the 4th International Workshop on Software Quality Assurance, ACM, . [pdf] [doi]
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Service

Organizing Committees

  • Tool Demonstrations co-chair, 24th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE 2016).
  • Artifact Evaluation co-chair, International Symposium on Engineering Secure Software and Systems (ESSoS 2016).
  • Artifact Evaluation co-chair, International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA 2016).
  • Tool Demonstrations co-chair, IEEE and ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2015).
  • GI-Dagstuhl Seminar 14433 on Software Engineering for Self-Adaptive Systems, October 2014.

Program Committees

  • Program Committees Member, 23rd IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution, and Reengineering (SANER 2016)
  • Expert Review Panel Member , IEEE and ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2015).
  • Artifact Evaluation Committee Member, 10th Joint Meeting of the European Software Engineering Conference and the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE 2015).
  • Program Committee Member, ACM International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA 2015).
  • Program Committee Member, IEEE and ACM-SIGSOFT International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE SEIP track 2015).
  • Program Committee Member, 10th International Symposium on Software Engineering for Adaptive and Self-Managing Systems (SEAMS 2015) co-located with the IEEE and ACM-SIGSOFT International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2015)
  • Program Committee Member, Italian Student Contest on Software Engineering (SCORE-it 2015) co-located with the IEEE and ACM-SIGSOFT International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2015).
  • Artifact Evaluation Committee Member, ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE 2014).
  • Artifact Evaluation Committee Member, ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis (ISSTA 2014).
  • Program Committee Member, IEEE and ACM-SIGSOFT International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE Posters track 2014).
  • Artifact Evaluation Committee Member, ACM SIGPLAN Conference on Systems, Programming, Languages and Applications (OOPSLA 2013).
  • Expert Review Panel Member, IEEE and ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2013).
  • Program Committee Member, Student Contest on Software Engineering (SCORE 2013) co-located with the IEEE and ACM-SIGSOFT International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2013).
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