Romain Robbes

I am a "Directeur de Recherche" (Senior Scientist) at CNRS since 2023. Earlier, I was an Associate Professor at the University of Chile, and the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, Italy. Even earlier, I earned my Ph.D at the University of Lugano, Switzerland and studied at the University of Caen, France.

I work in the Progress Team (LaBRI, University of Bordeaux, France), where I conduct research at the interaction of Empirical Software Engineering and Machine Learning, with interests in Software Evolution, Mining Software Repositories, and Large Language Models.

I also have some responsibilities in the national and international research community.

You can find more information about my research and activities on DBLP, Google Scholar, and Researchr, where you can access my publications, service roles, and conference activities.

News

2026

• Received a Distinguished Reviewer Award at FSE 2026
• Invited speaker at the 71st CREST Open Workshop
• Paper "Agentic Much? Adoption of Coding Agents on GitHub" accepted at TOSEM (follow-up study on ArXiv)
• Three papers accepted at ICSME 2026: "AI Policy, Disclosure, and Human in the Loop: How Are Contribution Guidelines Adapting to GenAI?", "TestMiner: Software Testing Analysis for GitHub Repositories", and "Teaching LLMs a Low-Resource Language: Enhancing Code Completion in Pharo"
• Received a Distinguished Reviewer Award at ICSE 2026
• Paper "Promises, Perils, and (Timely) Heuristics for Mining Coding Agent Activity" received an ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award at MSR 2026
• Finally updated my website!
• Journal article "RunBugRun: An executable dataset for automated program repair" published in Empirical Software Engineering (congrats Julian!)
• Paper "Package-Aware Approach for Repository-Level Code Completion in Pharo" on ArXiv
• Paper "Agentic Much? Adoption of Coding Agents on GitHub" on ArXiv
• Paper "Promises, Perils, and (Timely) Heuristics for Mining Coding Agent Activity" accepted at MSR 2026
• Paper "Are Coding Agents Generating Over-Mocked Tests? An Empirical Study" accepted at MSR 2026 (congrats André!)
• Paper "DRAGON: Robust Classification for Very Large Collections of Software Repositories" on ArXiv
• Serving as Session Chair for AI for Software Engineering 4 at ICSE 2026
• Serving as MIP Award Co-Chair for MSR 2026
• Serving as PC Member for ICSE 2027
• Invited talk at the ASF Winter School on Distributed Systems & Networks 2026: "LLMs, Agents, and their adoption in Software Engineering"

2025

• Serving as PC Member for FSE 2026 and ASE 2026
• ROSEAU paper received a Distinguished Paper Award at ICSME 2025 (special congrats to Thomas and Corentin!)
• Paper "ROSEAU: Fast, Accurate, Source-based Breaking Change Analysis in Java" accepted at ICSME 2025 (congrats Corentin!)
• Paper "Client–Library Compatibility Testing with API Interaction Snapshots" accepted at ICSME 2025 (congrats Gustave!)
• Serving as PC Member for ASE 2025 and ICSE 2026
• Paper "Automatic Classification of Software Repositories: a Systematic Mapping Study" accepted at EASE 2025 (congrats Stefano!)
• With the CSI of CNRS Sciences Informatiques, we are organizing a seminar on Generative AI on March 12, at the seat of the CNRS in Paris. Come join us!
• Serving as Session Chair for Human and Social using AI 1 (Research Track) at ICSE 2025
• Organizing a joint meeting of the GTs GL-IA and GT VL in Rennes
• Papers accepted at Forge 2025 and APR 2025: "Extracting Fix Ingredients using Language Models" (arXiv), "Bogus Bugs, Duplicates, and Revealing Comments: Data Quality Issues in NPR" (arXiv), "Simple Fault Localization Using Execution Traces" (arXiv) (congrats Julian!)
• Serving as Most Influential Paper Award co-chair for MSR 2025

2024

• Served as Vice-President of the ANR thematic call on Artificial Intelligence (TSIA 2024) for the topic Machine Learning Operations, Software Engineering for Artificial Intelligence
• Participated in Shonan Meeting 176: Foundation Models and Software Engineering: Challenges and Opportunities
• Gave an invited talk at the FM+SE SUMMIT 2024
• Made two vulgarization talks and participated to a roundtable about LLMs at the University of Bordeaux.
• Serving as PC Member for ICSE 2025
• Paper "Impermanent identifiers: Enhanced source code comprehension and refactoring" accepted at the JSS (congrats Eduardo!)
• Organizing a special session of the GT GL-IA at the national Software Engineering Conference
• Paper "Out of Context: How important is Local Context in Neural Program Repair?" accepted at ICSE 2024 (congrats Julian!) and "What the Fix? A Study of ASAT Rules Documentation" at ICPC 2024 (congrats, Corentin!)
• Paper "INSPECT: Intrinsic and Systematic Probing Evaluation for Code Transformers" accepted at TSE (congrats Anjan!)
• Serving as Keynote co-chair for MSR 2024
• Serving as ERA track Co-chair for SANER 2024
• Joined two CSI working groups: Generative AI (WG coordinator) and Internationalization
• Member of the Scientific Board (Conseil Scientifique d'Institut, CSI) of the CNRS Computer Science Institute (2024-2028)

2023

• Organizing a meeting of the GTs GL-IA and VL in Paris
• Serving as PC Member for FSE 2024 and ICSME 2024
• Paper "JEMMA: An Extensible Java dataset for ML4Code applications" accepted at EMSE (congrats Anjan!)
• Serving as co-coordinator of the Working Group on Software Engineering and Artificial Intelligence (GT GL-IA) of the National Research Network on Software Engineering (GDR GPL)
• Invited to participate in the Dagstuhl Seminar 23062 on Programming Language Processing
• Joined the CNRS and the University of Bordeaux