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Hi! I'm a Professor of Software Engineering at the University of Sheffield.

I care about software quality and reliability. My research and teaching place an important emphasis on software testing.

From AI-driven systems to traditionally programmed software, my research seeks to understand how software tests can be better designed to reveal bugs, and how to best equip developers with automated techniques that enable the discovery of software failures.

Research

My research focusses on developing automated techniques for software testing, to help developers maintain "healthy" test suites that find bugs.

Recently my work has centred on helping developers detect and mitigate "flaky" software tests. I have also worked on mutation analysis approaches to help developers assess the quality of their test suites, including finding areas of code that while executed by tests may only be pseudo-tested. Other past areas of work have included detecting and repairing presentation failures and automatically generating tests using search-based test generation.

My work has been funded by the EPSRC and Meta. I am currently an associate editor for the Software Testing, Verification and Reliability journal, and I lead Sheffield's Testing Research Group.

Team

Testing group November 2024

We are part of the Testing Research Group at the University of Sheffield, one of the largest software testing groups in the UK.

I have previously supervised ten PhD students to completion as first supervisor.

Publications

See my full list of my publications, also recorded on my Google Scholar and DBLP profiles.

Some of my papers that have recently appeared include:

QAOA-PCA: Enhancing Efficiency in the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm via Principal Component Analysis
O Parry and P McMinn
International Workshop on Empirical Studies for Quantum Software Engineering (E-QSE), 2025
[PDF]
[]
@inproceedings{Parry2025b,
  author    = "Parry, Owain and McMinn, Phil",
  title     = "{QAOA-PCA}: Enhancing Efficiency in the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm
               via Principal Component Analysis",
  booktitle = "International Workshop on Empirical Studies for Quantum Software Engineering (E-QSE)",
  year      = "2025"
}

Systemic Flakiness: An Empirical Analysis of Co-Occurring Flaky Test Failures
O Parry, M Hilton, GM Kapfhammer and P McMinn
International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering (EASE), 2025
[PDF]
[]
@inproceedings{Parry2025,
  author    = "Parry, Owain and Hilton, Michael and Kapfhammer, Gregory M. and McMinn, Phil",
  title     = "Systemic Flakiness: An Empirical Analysis of Co-Occurring Flaky Test Failures",
  booktitle = "International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering (EASE)",
  year      = "2025"
}

Empirically Evaluating the Use of Bytecode for Diversity-Based Test Case Prioritisation
IT Elgendy, RM Hierons and P McMinn
International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering (EASE), 2025
[PDF]
[]
@inproceedings{Elgendy2025b,
  author    = "Elgendy, Islam T. and Hierons, Robert M. and McMinn, Phil",
  title     = "Empirically Evaluating the Use of Bytecode for Diversity-Based Test Case
               Prioritisation",
  booktitle = "International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering (EASE)",
  year      = "2025"
}

Empirically Evaluating Flaky Tests for Autonomous Driving Systems in Simulated Environments
AM Osikowicz, P McMinn and D Shin
Flaky Tests Workshop (FTW), 2025
[PDF]
[]
@inproceedings{Osikowicz2025,
  author    = "Osikowicz, Aleksander M. and McMinn, Phil and Shin, Donghwan",
  title     = "Empirically Evaluating Flaky Tests for Autonomous Driving Systems in Simulated
               Environments",
  booktitle = "Flaky Tests Workshop (FTW)",
  year      = "2025"
}

Beyond Test Flakiness: A Manifesto for a Holistic Approach to Test Suite Health
P McMinn, MF Roslan and GM Kapfhammer
Flaky Tests Workshop (FTW), 2025
[PDF]
[]
@inproceedings{McMinn2025,
  author    = "McMinn, Phil and Roslan, Muhammad Firhard and Kapfhammer, Gregory M.",
  title     = "Beyond Test Flakiness: A Manifesto for a Holistic Approach to Test Suite Health",
  booktitle = "Flaky Tests Workshop (FTW)",
  year      = "2025"
}

A Systematic Mapping Study of the Metrics, Uses, and Subjects of Diversity-Based Testing Techniques
IT Elgendy, RM Hierons and P McMinn
Software Testing, Verification and Reliability, 2025
[PDF]
[DOI]
[]
@article{Elgendy2025,
  author  = "Elgendy, Islam T. and Hierons, Robert M. and McMinn, Phil",
  title   = "A Systematic Mapping Study of the Metrics, Uses, and Subjects of Diversity-Based
             Testing Techniques",
  journal = "Software Testing, Verification and Reliability",
  year    = "2025"
}

Teaching

I teach the first-year COM1001 Introduction to Software Engineering module. Key to the module is team-based software development, writing automated tests, and improving code design through refactoring.

I also teach the third-year COM3529 Software Testing and Analysis module. Topics include how to write effective, maintainable tests, and how to analyse their quality. The module also covers more research-oriented topics such as automatically generating test cases (e.g., through fuzzing and search-based techniques), mutation analysis, and methods for test case priortisation.

I also supervise a range of third year dissertation projects on topics in software engineering, software testing, and on those provided by local industry partners.