SENSE Lab
Prof. Weiyi Shang leads the Software Engineering and System Engineering (SENSE) Lab at the University of Waterloo. The lab conducts empirical and experimental research to build observable, performant, and maintainable software.
Visit SENSE Lab WebsiteSoftware Engineering Program
Weiyi Shang serves as the Associate Director of the Software Engineering Program at the University of Waterloo.
Book a Meeting (SE Students Only)Selected Publications
An automatically selected recent publications. For a complete list of publications, please visit the SENSE Lab Publications page or Weiyi Shang's Google Scholar page.
2026
[TOSEM 2026] Jianchen Zhao, Kundi Yao, Masanari Kondo, Hetong Dai, Weiyi Shang, Yasutaka Kamei. Not-So-Pretty: Studying and Segmenting Multiline Console Logs. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology. PDF
[ICSE 2026] Zongxiong Chen, Derui Zhu, Kundi Yao, Weiyi Shang, Jinfu Chen, Jiahui Geng, Alexander Pretschner, Jens Grossklags, Manfred Hauswirth, Sonja Schimmler. LLM4JMH: Studying the Use of LLMs for Generating Java Performance Microbenchmarks. The 48th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering.
2025
[ICSE 2025] Lizhi Liao, Simon Eismann, Heng Li, Cor-Paul Bezemer, Diego Elias Costa, André van Hoorn, Weiyi Shang. Early Detection of Performance Regressions by Bridging Local Performance Data and Architectural Models. The 47th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering. SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award PDF
[NeurIPS 2025] Derui Zhu, Dingfan Chen, Jinfu Chen, Jens Grossklags, Walter Pretschner, and Weiyi Shang. More Than Just Functional: LLM-as-a-Critique for Efficient Code Generation. The Thirty-Ninth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems. PDF
[ASE 2025] Haonan Zhang, Kundi Yao, Zishuo Ding, Lizhi Liao, Weiyi Shang. Who's to Blame? Rethinking the Brittleness of Automated Web GUI Testing from a Pragmatic Perspective. The 40th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering. PDF
[ASE 2025] Tri Minh-Triet Pham, Diego Elias Costa, Weiyi Shang, and Jinqiu Yang. ADPerf: Investigating and Testing Performance in Autonomous Driving Systems. The 40th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering. PDF
[TOSEM 2025] Hetong Dai, Kundi Yao, Felix Li, Jianxin You, Qianyun Shen, Weiyi Shang. LPB-Gen: Systematic Large Log-Parsing Benchmarks Generation. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology. PDF
[TOSEM 2025] Xiaohui Wang, Youshuai Tan, Zishuo Ding, Jinfu Chen, Jifeng Xuan, Weiyi Shang. Enhancing Log Sentiments: An Exploratory Study of Sentiments and Emotions with Software Logs. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology. PDF
2024
[TSE 2024] Yuanjie Xia, Lizhi Liao, Jinfu Chen, Heng Li, and Weiyi Shang. Reducing the Length of Field-replay Based Load Testing. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. PDF
[NeurIPS 2024] Dong Huang, Yuhao Qing, Weiyi Shang, Heming Cui, and Jie Zhang. EffiBench: Benchmarking the Efficiency of Automatically Generated Code. The Thirty-Eighth Annual Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems. PDF
[ASE 2024] Haonan Zhang, Lizhi Liao, Zishuo Ding, Weiyi Shang, Nidhi Narula, Catalin Sporea, Andrei Toma and Sarah Sajedi. Towards a Robust Waiting Strategy for Web GUI Testing for an Industrial Software System. The 39th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE 2024), Industry Track. PDF
[TOSEM 2024] Olivier Nourry, Yutaro Kashiwa, Weiyi Shang, Honglin Shu, and Yasutaka Kamei. My Fuzzers Won’t Build: An Empirical Study of Fuzzing Build Failures. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology. PDF
2023
[TSE 2023] Youshuai Tan, Jinfu Chen, Weiyi Shang, Tao Zhang, Sen Fang, Xiapu Luo, Zijie Chen, and Shuhao Qi. STRE: An Automated Approach to Suggesting App Developers When to Stop Reading Reviews. IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering. PDF
[TOSEM 2023] Zishuo Ding, Yiming Tang, Xiaoyu Cheng, Heng Li, and Weiyi Shang. LoGenText-Plus: Improving Neural Machine Translation-based Logging Texts Generation with Syntactic Templates. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology. PDF
[ASE 2023] Yuanjie Xia, Zishuo Ding, and Weiyi Shang. CoMSA: A modeling driven sampling approach for configuration performance testing. The 38th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering. PDF
[ASE 2023] Zhenhao Li, An Ran Chen, Xing Hu, Xin Xia, Tse-Hsun Chen and Weiyi Shang. Are They All Good? Studying Practitioners' Expectations on the Readability of Log Messages. The 38th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering. PDF
[FSE 2023] Jinfu Chen, Zishuo Ding, Yiming Tang, Mohammed Sayagh, Heng Li, Bram Adams and Weiyi Shang. IoPV: On Inconsistent Option Performance Variations. ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE 2023). PDF
[ICSE 2023] Zishuo Ding, Yiming Tang, Yang Li, Heng Li, and Weiyi Shang. On the Temporal Relations between Logging and Code. The 45th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering. PDF
[ICSE 2023] Hetong Dai, Yiming Tang, Heng Li, and Weiyi Shang. PILAR: Studying and Mitigating the Influence of Configurations on Log Parsing. The 45th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering. PDF
[ICSE 2023] Zhenhao Li, Chuan Luo, Tse-Hsun (Peter) Chen, Weiyi Shang, Shilin He, Qingwei Lin and Dongmei Zhang. Did We Miss Something Important? Studying and Exploring Variable-Aware Log Abstraction. The 45th IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering. PDF
About Me
My general research area is Software Engineering. In particular, my research interest includes software engineering for ultra-large-scale systems, software log mining, empirical software engineering, mining software repositories, and performance engineering. Our research group studies how to make complex software systems more observable, performant, and maintainable.
Core Research Questions Addressed
How to debug and verify software systems in the large-scale field environment?
Can we identify performance issues in ultra-large-scale systems?
How to improve logging practice in software development and operation?
What can we learn from past software development (source code/bugs) and operation history (performance/field failures)?
How to scale software engineering research to cope with big data?
Education
Ph.D. in Computer Science
Queen's University, Kingston, Canada
Supervised by Dr. Ahmed E. Hassan
Thesis: Log Engineering: Towards Systematic Log Mining to Support the Development of Ultra-large Scale Systems Thesis PDF
M.Sc. in Computer Science
Queen's University, Kingston, Canada
Supervised by Dr. Ahmed E. Hassan
Thesis: Enabling Large-Scale Mining Software Repositories Studies Using Web-Scale Platforms Thesis PDF
B.Eng. in Computer Science
Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT), China
Awards & Recognitions
ACM Distinguished Member
Recognized for outstanding scientific contributions to computing.
Faculty Research Excellence Award
University of Waterloo, Faculty of Engineering.
ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award
Received at ICSE 2025 for performance regression research.
Distinguished Reviewer Award
International Conference on Internetware.
Distinguished Service Award
ACM/IEEE International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (ASE).
CS-CAN Outstanding Early Career Researcher Award
National recognition for top computer science researchers in Canada.
ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award
Received at ICSE 2020 for release testing pipelines.
Distinguished Reviewer Award
Empirical Software Engineering (EMSE) Journal.
Best Paper Nomination
ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE).
Outstanding Reviewer Award
Journal of Systems and Software (JSS).
Best ERA Paper Award
IEEE/ACM International Conference on Program Comprehension (ICPC).
Concordia University Research Chair
Ultra-Large-Scale Systems, 2017–2023.
Best Paper Nomination
ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE).
Ph.D. Research Achievement Award
School of Computing, Queen's University.
ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award
Received at ICSE 2013 for big data analytics cloud deployments.
Best Paper Award
Received at WCRE 2011 for software execution logs evolution research.
Teaching
University of Waterloo
CS 447/647 / ECE 453: Software Testing, Quality Assurance, and Maintenance
Focuses on software quality concepts, black-box/white-box testing, unit/integration testing strategies, structural test criteria, testing automation, and maintaining complex systems.
SE 465: Software Testing and Quality Assurance
Introduction to software testing techniques, regression test selection, test adequacy criteria, and tools for automated QA pipelines.
SE 464: Software Design and Architectures
Examines architectural styles, design patterns, design principles, modularity, software re-engineering, and middleware frameworks.
ECE 750: Mining Large Software Data
Advanced study on utilizing software execution logs, developer repositories, commit logs, and bug report archives to build smart dev tools.
Concordia University
SOEN 691: Mining Large Software System Data for DevOps
Provides materials, methods, and industrial patterns on empirical data mining in modern DevOps pipelines. Course material is available for Winter 2016 and Fall 2016/Current.
SOEN 345: Software Testing and Quality Assurance
Coverage of software testing theory and tools, structural criteria, integration testing, and test environment automation.
SOEN 390: Software Engineering Team Project
A collaborative project-driven course where students design and implement substantial software systems following strict engineering practices.
SOEN 341: Software Process
Examines agile and traditional software lifecycle processes, requirements elicitation, team workflows, and version control. (Course materials on Moodle).
Queen's University
CISC 880: Engineering Ultra-Large-Scale Systems
Deals with the deployment, performance engineering, monitoring, log analysis, and architectural constraints of internet-scale software applications.
Contact
Feel free to get in touch regarding research opportunities, collaborations, or coursework queries.
Office Location
DC 2526
University of Waterloo
Mailing Address
Department of Electrical & Computer Engineering
200 University Avenue West
Waterloo, ON, Canada N2L 3G1