Neil Walkinshaw

Courts service accused of covering up IT bug that caused evidence to go missing Sources say judges in courts and tribunals will have made rulings when evidence was incomplete.

As with the post office Horizon bug, years of institutional coverup and mismanagement after the bug is exposed. This probably causes more damage than the technical bug itself.
www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

An account of what is possibly the first "monkey tester" (or at least when the term originated) - a program to automatically generate random test inputs. Developed in 1983 to test MacWrite and MacPaint!

www.folklore.org/Monkey_Lives...

Howard G. Smith MD, AM on Instagram: "A defective iOS (iPhone/iPad) app can rapidly deplete your Tandem insulin pump battery and trigger a dangerous shutdown The Food and Drug Administration and Tand... 0 likes, 0 comments - drhowardsmithreports on August 15, 2024: "A defective iOS (iPhone/iPad) app can rapidly deplete your Tandem insulin pump battery and trigger a dangerous shutdown The Food and Dr...

Tandem's t:connect iOS mobile app that controls monitors the t:slim X2 insulin pump and its battery causes a battery depletion and an unexpected pump shut down. #tandem #insulinpump #iOSapp #tconnect #battery #shutdown #hyperglycemia #recall
www.instagram.com/p/C-s-U3fxxBg/

I found this very interesting. Could be interesting to consider a variant of this for research paper submissions to Computer Science conferences, where the ballooning review burden is completely unsustainable.

Would need to devise different measures to prevent misuse though.

UK unis sign up to £10M Oracle Java subscription framework : Deal includes 'waiver of historic fees'

An odd licensing approach - hardly going to make Java the obvious teaching choice for higher education in years to come?

www.theregister.com/2025/06/13/j...

GitHub - DES-Lab/AALpy: An Automata Learning Library Written in Python An Automata Learning Library Written in Python. Contribute to DES-Lab/AALpy development by creating an account on GitHub.

AALpy - a very elegant Python library (not by me!) implementing several finite state machine inference algorithms. Includes active and passive approaches, state-merging and observation-table based ones.

github.com/DES-Lab/AALpy

GitHub - erikbern/git-of-theseus: Analyze how a Git repo grows over time Analyze how a Git repo grows over time. Contribute to erikbern/git-of-theseus development by creating an account on GitHub.

Simple visualisations of code "survival" over time: github.com/erikbern/git...

Several groups of students have tried this on a variety of OSS projects. Anecdotally it seems that the "half-life" of the code for a given version is remarkably short! Would welcome pointers to studies on this!

UK driverless cars unlikely until 2027 - Uber says it's ready now The previous government had said autonomous vehicles were

Procedures for testing driverless cars (at least the underlying ML) are still effectively in their infancy, so it's interesting that these will be on UK roads so soon. Particularly interested in accountability (moral & legal) when accidents inevitably occur.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Blast from the past: "How Do We Trust Our Science Code?"

Most scientific research code is low quality and riddled with bugs, written by people who aren't professional software developers. And we shouldn't expect them to be!

(Written eight years ago, Jesus)

www.hillelwayne.com/post/how-do-...

Reminder: I am hiring 1-2 PhD students to research the use of LLMs to augment human-written test suites!

Interested? Apply here: www.chalmers.se/en/about-cha...
Reach out if you have questions!

#softwaretesting #softwareengineering #softwaredevelopment #LLM #AI #PHD

I'm seeking 1-2 Ph.D. students, who will conduct research on how LLMs can extend and augment the software tests created by humans. Please apply, share, and get in touch if you have questions!

Apply at: www.chalmers.se/en/about-cha...

LLMs can't stop making up software dependencies and sabotaging everything : Hallucinated package names fuel 'slopsquatting'

LLMs hallucinating nonexistent software packages with plausible names leads to a new malware vulnerability: "slopsquatting."

3 from me!

[REVIEW]: The Causal Testing Framework · Issue #7739 · openjournals/joss-reviews Submitting author: @jmafoster1 (Michael Foster) Repository: https://github.com/CITCOM-project/CausalTestingFramework Branch with paper.md (empty if default branch): Version: v10.0.1 Editor: @daniel...

So impressed by the JOSS publication model. The whole process is run on GitHub! Reviews are submitted as issues! github.com/openjournals...

Who needs big publishers. If there were a way to introduce anonymity into the reviewing process (surely possible), this is the way forward imho.

The Causal Testing Framework Foster et al., (2025). The Causal Testing Framework. Journal of Open Source Software, 10(107), 7739, https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.07739

Our Causal Testing Framework, part of the EPSRC-funded CITCOM project, has just been published in @joss-openjournals.bsky.social.

joss.theoj.org/papers/10.21...

Supports testing of "hard-to-test" systems with large input spaces, nondeterminism and long execution times.

Enter the Gungeon Enter the Gungeon is a gunfight dungeon crawler following a band of misfits seeking to shoot, loot, dodge roll and table-flip their way to personal absolution by reaching the legendary Gungeon’s ultim...

I never play computer games these days. But I got to spend a couple of hours playing Enter the Gungeon (enterthegungeon.com) with my son (very much the gamer) , and it's fantastic. Retro and amusing - highly recommend!

Especially short-sighted, given that so many key technologies that underpin the strong growth in the US economy, especially in AI, have emerged from these very research institutions.

Does authorship mean anything when academic papers are simply citable tokens? The bibliometric infrastructure of citations has become an inescapable organising feature of academic life. Drawing on a range of evidence of the use and misuse of citations data, Stuart Macdonald …

blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsoci...

Be cited or perish? I don't recognise some of the worst practices in CS (hope I'm not being naiive!), but concerning nonetheless...

School phone policies and their association with mental wellbeing, phone use, and social media use (SMART Schools): a cross-sectional observational study There is no evidence that restrictive school policies are associated with overall phone and social media use or better mental wellbeing in adolescents. The findings do not provide evidence to support ...

This article claiming "no evidence" that mobile phone restrictions in schools have no impact on social media usage or wellbeing has been widely reported in the UK: www.thelancet.com/journals/lan...

Worth noting the absence of any causal analysis, despite many confounding factors.

Why are universities ending their Elsevier open access agreements? After recent reporting that three UK universities had ended their transitional open access agreements with the publisher Elsevier, Peter Barr explains why academic libraries are making these decisi…

Why are universities ending their #Elsevier #OpenAccess agreements?

Peter Barr @tweeterbarr.bsky.social explains the reasoning behind these decisions and what it says about the wider academic publishing sector in the UK on @lseimpactblog.bsky.social 👇

Delighted for my Ph.D. student Richard Somers, whose work on using a digital twin (of blood-glucose dynamics in a human) to test artificial pancreas systems for diabetics has just been published in STVR:

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10....

Cool and wacky work from Neil Walkinshaw on trying to get a formal solution to the “stopping problem” in random testing. arxiv.org/pdf/2405.17019. This formulation has a bunch of limitations/assumptions, but I really enjoy the framing and line of thought.

Why probability probably doesn’t exist (but it is useful to act like it does) All of statistics and much of science depends on probability — an astonishing achievement, considering no one’s really sure what it is.

A great essay on the subjective nature of probability: www.nature.com/articles/d41...

A probability is not an objective property of the world. Pertinent to many Software Engineering contexts.

Motivated my recent forays into Subjective Logic (which attempts to make this subjectivity explicit).

Delighted to be co-organising the inaugural CauSE 2025 workshop (Causal Methods in Software Engineering), co-located with FSE in Trondheim.

We welcome papers on all things causality and SE! Deadline Feb. 25th.

Spread the word!

causality-software-engineering.github.io/cause-worksh...

Took on a safety critical systems course this semester.

"NORAD's missile warning system: What went wrong" provides an arresting list of near-misses.

The accidental introduction of "mass raid" test data into the live system must have been especially frightening!

www.gao.gov/assets/masad...

Added to today's playlist, thanks Shin! A strong start for my first ever Bluesky interaction!!

I'm here for the Steve Vai videos @ntrolls.bsky.social !