ESEM Conference 2026
The 20th International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESEM) was held in Munich on October 8–9, 2026. Over two intense days, I had the pleasure of attending talks on a wide range of topics, from requirements engineering to software maintenance and testing. Unsurprisingly, AI was a common theme across all stages of the software lifecycle. Keynote talks by Markku Oivo (M3S, University of Oulu) and Tobias Schimmer (SAP Labs) presented realistic visions of how to use AI in software engineering today.
I enjoyed presenting our paper on test-aware mutant generation using LLMs, joint work with Zainab Saad, Zirui Wang, Steve Drew, and Samira Ebrahimi Kahou. The audience gave valuable feedback: instead of working with a fixed set of base and extended tests, it would be interesting to analyze base test saturation. Thank you to everyone attending, and in particular to the organizers for putting together such a well-executed conference.
The schedule overview is visualized below, colored by theme. My own session is outlined in red, and sessions where I attended talks are marked with 👀.