Research Directions

What We Study

Our work spans software engineering, DevOps, open-source ecosystems, and AI-augmented tooling.

Core Research Areas

Six active streams at the intersection of SE, AI, and ecosystem science

🤖

AI for Software Engineering

Leveraging LLMs and machine learning to automate software analysis, code generation, and software maintenance tasks.

🚀

DevOps & CI/CD

Understanding and optimizing CI/CD pipelines (e.g. GitHub Actions, Docker builds), build faults, configuration smells, and workflow performance.

🌱

Software Ecosystem

Studying package dependencies, deprecation, license usage, and ecosystem health in open-source repositories (NPM, Maven, PyPI).

🔍

Empirical Software Engineering

Rigorous empirical studies in software repositories, model cards, developer discussions, and evolving technical documentation.

🧪

Software Testing & Analysis

Automated test generation, code differencing, model card validation, and runtime analysis for modern software systems.

📚

MLOps & DataOps

Studying machine learning workflows, AI resource management, and data-driven operations in collaborative open-source projects.

Publications

Selected publications from our group

2026
✓ Accepted

Looks Good, But Does It Run? A Large-Scale Empirical Study of the Executability of Example Code in Model Cards

Simeng Yao, Jialin Zhao, Yang Zhang†, Tun Li, Tao Wang, Changrong Xie, Zezhou Tang, Yiwen Wu

ASE 2026 CCF-AConference

2026
✓ Accepted

Deprecated but Not Abandoned: A Large-Scale Empirical Study on Growing-user-demand Deprecated NPM Packages

Zezhou Tang, Yang Zhang†, Xinjun Mao, Tanghaoran Zhang, Changrong Xie, Wenyu Xu, Simeng Yao, Yiwen Wu

ISSTA 2026 CCF-AConference

2025

DockerFill: Automatically Completing Dockerfile Code with Syntax-aware Multi-task Learning

Yiwen Wu, Yang Zhang†, Tao Wang, Bo Ding, Huaimin Wang

IEEE TSE CCF-AJournal

2025

Towards Understanding Docker Build Faults in Practice: Symptoms, Root Causes, and Fix Patterns

Yiwen Wu*, Yang Zhang*†, Tao Wang, Bo Ding, Huaimin Wang

FSE 2025 CCF-AConference

2024

How do Developers Talk about GitHub Actions? Evidence from Online Software Development Community

Yang Zhang*, Yiwen Wu*, Tingting Chen, Tao Wang, Hui Liu, Huaimin Wang

ICSE 2024 CCF-AConference

2022

Understanding and Predicting Docker Build Duration: An Empirical Study of Containerized Workflow of OSS Projects

Yiwen Wu, Yang Zhang†, Kele Xu, Tao Wang, Huaimin Wang

ASE 2022 CCF-AConference

2018

One Size Does Not Fit All: An Empirical Study of Containerized Continuous Deployment Workflows

Yang Zhang, Bogdan Vasilescu, Huaimin Wang, Vladimir Filkov

ESEC/FSE 2018 CCF-AConference

View full publication list on Prof. Zhang's homepage →