I lead the Software PErformance, Analysis, and Reliability (SPEAR) lab at Concordia University. My research focuses on improving the quality of large-scale software systems. Specifically, I work on areas such as log analysis and AIOps, software performance analysis, software testing, and mining software repositories. My research group has extensive collaboration with companies such as Ericsson, Microsoft, and BlackBerry. The research tools developed by myself and my students were integrated into industrial practice for ensuring the quality of large-scale enterprise systems.

In particular, my research aims to solve challenges such as:

• Can we leverage Large-Language Models (LLM) to assist developers with development, debugging, and maintenance?
• Can we quickly help developers debug production systems by utilizing rich software data?
• Can we provide suggestions on how to optimize the software system by analyzing user usage data?
• How to improve software quality assurances in DevOps environments by analyzing test results from continuous integration?
• Can we provide useful suggestions to developers by mining software development history?

To perspective graduate students: Concordia has a very strong research presence in Software Engineering. Concordia’s Software Engineering is currently ranked as the top 10 in the world. Concordia is also ranked as one of the top 100 universities under 50 years old in the world . Graduated students from the SPEAR lab are how tenure-track assistant professors at top universities in the world (e.g., University of Alberta) or working as a senior researcher in industry. Montreal is the second largest city in Canada and is ranked as the best city for students in the world.

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• [Aug 2023] Congrats to Zhenhao, An Ran, and the co-authors on the acceptance of our ASE paper Are They All Good? Studying Practitioners’ Expectations on the Readability of Log Messages!
• [July 2023] Congrats to my PhD student An Ran Chen! He will join the University of Alberta as a tenure-track assistant professor in the fall!
• [June 2023] I will serve as a PC on the Research Track of FSE and MSR!
• [June 2023] Congrats to Tianlei and Shaowei on the acceptance of our JSS paper Study the Correlation Between the readme File of GitHub Projects and Their Popularity!
• [Feb 2023] Congrats to Wei on the acceptance of our TSE paper SLocator: Localizing the Origin of SQL Queries in Database-Backed Web Applications!
• [Dec 2022] Papers accepted at TSE, ICSE, and ICSE-SEIP!
• [Aug 2022] I will serve as a PC on the Research Track of AAAI 2023
• [Aug 2022] Congratulations to Zehao, Haoxiang, and Shaowei on the acceptance of our JSS paper An Empirical Study on the Challenges that Developers Encounter When Developing Apache Spark Applications!
• [July 2022] Congratulations to An Ran on the acceptance of our ASE paper How Useful is Code Change Information for Fault Localization in Continuous Integration?!
• [June 2022] Congratulations to Tarek and DJ on the acceptance of our ICSME paper An Empirical Study on Performance Bugs in Deep Learning Frameworks!
• [June 2022] Congratulations to the co-authors on the acceptance of our ICSME-NIER paper A First Look at Information Highlighting in Stack Overflow Answers!
• [June 2022] I will serve on the DEMO and Student Research Track of FSE 2022. Please consider submitting your papers there!
• [May 2022] Congratulations to Zhenhao Li on receiving the prestigious FRQNT PhD Scholarship!
• [April 2022] Congratulations to DJ Kim on receiving the prestigious NSERC PhD Scholarship!
• [Feb 2022] I am happy to share that I have received the Gina Cody Research award, which is given to outstanding researchers in GCS.
• [Aug 2021] Congratulations to Steve Locke on successfully defending his MSc thesis!!
• [June 2021] I am ranked as one of the most active SE researchers in the world by a paper published in JSS!
  
• [June 2021] I will serve on the program committee of AIOPS 2021
• [June 2021] I am co-editing a special issue in JISE on Software Engineering and DevOps. Please consider submitting your papers!
• [May 2021] We have two papers accepted in FSE! Congrats to my students Zehao and Dong Jae and the co-authors.
• [May 2021] Congratulations to Zehao Wang on successfully defending his MSc thesis! He will continue in the SPEAR lab as a PhD student.
• [Apr 2021] We have 1 paper accepted in TSE and 3 papers accepted in EMSE!
• [Mar 2021] I will serve on the program committee of the Software Engineering Education and Training Track@ICSE 2022.
• [Mar 2021] I will serve on the program committee of APSEC 2021.
• [Feb 2021] Our paper A Study of C/C++ Code Weaknesses on Stack Overflow has been accepted in TSE! Congrats to Zhenhao, Shaowei, Heng, and Ahmed!
• [Jan 2021] Our paper Studying Duplicate Logging Statements andTheir Relationships with Code Clones has been accepted in TSE! Congrats to Zhenhao, Jinqiu, and Weiyi!
• [Jan 2021] I am co-editing a special issue in EMSE on Software Performance. Please consider submitting your papers to EMSE!
• [Dec 2020] Two papers have been accepted in ICSE! Congrats to my students Dong Jae, Zhenhao, and all the co-authors!
• [Dec 2020] Our paper Revisiting Test Impact Analysis in Continuous Testing From the Perspective of Code Dependencies has been accepted in TSE! Congrats to Zi and Jinqiu!
• [Nov 2020] Our paper Demystifying the Challenges and Benefits of Analyzing User-Reported Logs in Bug Reports has been accepted in EMSE! Congrats to An Ran and Shaowei!
• [Nov 2020] Our paper Are Comments on StackOverflow Well Organized for Easy Retrieval by Developers? has been accepted in TOSEM! Congrats to Haoxiang, Shaowei, and Ahmed!
• [Aug 2020] Congratulations to Zi Peng on defending her MSc!
• [July 2020] Our paper A First Look at the Integration of Machine Learning Models in Complex Autonomous Driving Systems - A Case Study on Apollo has been accepted in FSE! Congrats to Peng, Jinqiu, and Lei!
• [July 2020] Our paper Where Shall We Log? Studying and Suggesting Logging Locations in Code Blocks has been accepted in ASE! Congrats to Zhenhao and Weiyi!
• [July 2020] I am co-editing a special issue in EMSE on Collective Knowledge in Software Engineering. Please consider submitting your papers to EMSE!
• [June 2020] Our paper Logram: Efficient Log Parsing Using n-Gram Dictionaries has been accepted in TSE! Congrats to Hetong, Heng, Che-Shao, and Weiyi!
• [June 2020] I will serve on the program committee of the Late-Breaking Results@ASE 2020.
• [April 2020] I will serve on the program committee of ICPE 2021.
• [April 2020] Our paper A3: Assisting Android API Migrations Using Code Examples has been accepted in TSE! Congrats to Max Lamothe and Weiyi!
• [April 2020] I will serve on the program committee of CASCON 2020.
• [Feb 2020] I will serve on the program committee of the Tool Demo track@ESEC/FSE 2020.
• [Feb 2020] I will serve on the program committee of SCAM 2020.
• [Feb 2020] Two of our papers Studying the Characteristics of Logging Practices in Mobile Apps: A Case Study on F-Droid and An Empirical Study of Obsolete Answers on Stack Overflow are accepted for presentation in ICSE 2020!
• [Jan 2020] I will serve on the program committee of ICSME 2020.
• [Nov 2019] Our paper Reading Answers on Stack Overflow: Not Enough! has been accepted in TSE!
• [Nov 2019] I will serve on the program committee of ICPC 2020.
• [Oct 2019] I am co-organizing LTB 2020. Please consider submitting papers to the workshop.
• [Aug 2019] Congratulations to An Ran Chen on defending his MSc. He is now a PhD student at SPEAR!
• [Aug 2019] Congratulations to Zhenhao Li on defending his MSc. He is now a PhD student at SPEAR!

Venues: 13 TSE _(A*), 10 ICSE _(A*), 4 FSE _(A*), 2 TOSEM _(A*), 3 ASE _(A*), 10 EMSE _(A), 2 ICSME _(A), 1 TR _(A), 3 JSS _(A), 4 MSR _(A), 1 ICDEW

_{*Ranked according to core ranking, where A* indicates the top venues in the research area, and A indicates highly-respected venues in the research area.}

Journal Papers

Conference Papers

• SOEN 7481 (Fall 2018, 2019): Software Verification and Testing
• SOEN 691 (Winter 2018): Mining Large Software System Data for DevOps
• SOEN 341 (Winter 2018, 2019, 2020, Fall 2019): Software Process
• SOEN 342 (Fall 2017): Software Requirements and Specifications

MSc Students

• Misheelt (Mia) Munkhjargal
• Nakhla Rafi
• Lorena Barreto
• Feng Lin

PhD Students

• Dong Jae Kim
• Arthur Vitui
• Wei Liu
• Zehao Wang
• Yi Wen Heng
• Zeyang Ma

Alumni

• An Ran Chen; 2023 (PhD); Tenure-Track Assistant Professor at the University of Alberta
• Shouvick Mondal, 2022 (Post-Doc); Tenure-Track Assistant Professor at IIT Gandhinagar
• Zhenhao Li, 2022 (PhD); Principal Research Engineer at Huawei
• Tarek Makkouk, 2023 (MSc)
• Steven Locke, 2021 (MSc); First Employment: Morgan Stanley
• Zehao Wang, 2021 (MSc); Continued as PhD student at SPEAR
• Zi Peng, 2020 (MSc); First Employment: Tangerine Software
• Zhenhao Li, 2019 (MSc); Continued as PhD student at SPEAR
• An Ran Chen, 2019 (MSc); Continued as PhD student at SPEAR
• Hugo Enrique Ochoa, 2019 (BSc)
• Jacqlyn Bender, 2019 (BSc)

Organizing Committee and Journal Editor

• ^{Co-editor of the Special Issue on Software Engineering and DevOps, Journal of Information Science and Engineering (JISE), 2021.}
• ^{The 12th International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE), Co-Chair of the Artifact Evaluation Track, 2021.}
• ^{Co-editor of the Special Issue on Software Performance, Empirical Software Engineering Journal (EMSE), 2020.}
• ^{Co-editor of the Special Issue on Collective Knowledge in Software Engineering, Empirical Software Engineering Journal (EMSE), 2020.}
• ^{The 8th International Workshop on Load Testing and Benchmarking of Software Systems (LTB), Program Chair, 2020.}
• ^{The 41th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), Organizing Committee, 2019.}

Program Committee Member

• ^{The 37th AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), 2023.}
• ^{The 30th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE), Tool Demo Track, 2022.}
• ^{The 30th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE), Student Research Competition Track, 2022.}
• ^{The 36th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME), 2022.}
• ^{The 19th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR), Data and Tool Showcase Track, 2022.}
• ^{The 19th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR), Data and Tool Showcase Track, 2022.}
• ^{The 19th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR), Registered Report Track, 2022.}
• ^{The 19th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR), 2022.}
• ^{The 44th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), Software Engineering Education and Training Track, 2022.}
• ^{The 13th International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE), 2022.}
• ^{The 2nd International Conference on AIOps (AIOPS), 2021.}
• ^{The 18th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR), 2021.}
• ^{The 12th International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE), 2021.}
• ^{The 12th International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE), Work-in-progress and Vision Track Track, 2021.}
• ^{The 35th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE), Late Breaking Results, 2020.}
• ^{The 30th Annual International Conference on Computer Science and Software Engineering (CASCON), 2020.}
• ^{The 28th ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE), Tool Demo Track, 2020.}
• ^{The 20th IEEE International Working Conference on Source Code Analysis and Manipulation (SCAM), 2020.}
• ^{The 36th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME), 2020.}
• ^{The 28th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC), 2020.}
• ^{The 13th IEEE International Conference on Software Testing, Validation and Verification (ICST), Posters Track, 2020.}
• ^{The 29th Annual International Conference on Computer Science and Software Engineering (CASCON), 2019.}
• ^{The 18th National Software Application Conference (NASAC), Intelligent SE Track, 2019.}
• ^{The 34th International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE), Tool Demo Track, 2019.}
• ^{The 27th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC), 2019.}
• ^{The 26th IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER), ERA Track, 2019.}
• ^{The 26th IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER), Tool Demo Track, 2019.}
• ^{The 34th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME), 2018.}
• ^{The 28th Annual International Conference on Computer Science and Software Engineering (CASCON), 2018.}
• ^{The 25th IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER), ERA Track, 2018.}

Journal Reviewer

• ^{IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE).}
• ^{Empirical Software Engineering Journal (EMSE).}
• ^{ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security (TOPS).}
• ^{IEEE Transactions on Reliability (TR).}
• ^{Journal of Systems and Software (JSS).}
• ^{IEEE Software.}
• ^{Information Processing Letters (IPL).}
• ^{Science of Computer Programming (SCP).}

• peterc@encs.concordia.ca