Most influential paper award for Gilles Perrouin

Gilles Perrouin has been an FNRS Qualified Researcher at the Faculty of Computer Science since October 2017 and a member of the Namur Digital Institute (NaDI). He has just received the "Most influential paper award" at the 28th edition of the ACM International Systems and Software Product Line Conference (SPLC 2024).

This award is presented at each edition of SPLC. It rewards the author(s) of a paper in the field of software product lines published 10 years ago or more, regardless of the conference or scientific journal where it was published, considered to have had the most influence on the theory or practice of this field of research.

The awarded publication had been published at the International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation (ICST) in 2010.

It has established a pragmatic approach to selecting software products for testing from the vast array of possibilities offered by a product line. This approach is based on interaction testing between software elements and automates the entire chain, making it accessible to developers and testers who are not specialists in constraint solvers. The article also provides metrics for comparing different selection approaches. It subsequently inspired numerous product selection techniques, which form the de facto standard approach to testing software product lines.

Gilles Perrouin was a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Luxembourg at the time of publication of the award-winning article, shortly before arriving at the University of Namur in May 2010. This work initiated a fruitful line of research on software product line testing, awarded another "Most influential paper award" for the work of Xavier Devroey (UNamur) in February 2024.