Neil Walkinshaw

Neil Walkinshaw is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science at The University of Sheffield, Faculty of Engineering. He serves as joint PC-chair for the International Conference on Software Testing (ICST'26) and is an associate editor for the Journal of Automated Software Engineering.

His research focuses on improving the trustworthiness and reliability of software and cyber-physical systems, with particular expertise in testing "hard to test" systems that have long execution times, non-determinism, limited state observability, and large input/output spaces. He has secured funding from EPSRC (CITCOM, REGI, and STAMINA projects), InnovateUK, DSTL, and the DfT.

Walkinshaw's research spans three main areas:

• Causal Software Engineering: Applying Causal Inference to test causal input-output relationships in software and cyberphysical systems, including scientific models, automated driving systems, and cyberphysical systems.
• State Machine Inference and Analysis: Developing techniques to understand sequential behavior of systems when a prior model is unavailable, including Extended Finite State Machine inference and LTSDiff algorithm for comparing state machines.
• Second-order uncertainty in Software Engineering: Using Subjective Logic to reason about uncertainty in empirical software engineering experiments and inferred state machines.

His recent publications (2023-2025) demonstrate a strong focus on causal testing methodologies, with applications to scientific software models (CovaSim, Luo-Rudy model), cyber-physical systems (Artificial Pancreas), and automated driving simulators. His work on the CITCOM Causal Testing Framework provides an open-source implementation of these approaches.

His scientific achievements include:

• Best Research Paper Award at EASE'25 for "Using Causal Inference to Test Systems with Hidden and Interacting Variables"
• Development of the CITCOM Causal Testing Framework (GitHub, MIT License)
• Significant contributions to state machine inference and analysis

Walkinshaw actively supervises PhD students and has successfully guided seven PhD students to completion. He teaches Software Reengineering and leads the Computer Science Ambassadors module, focusing on making Computer Science more inclusive. As the school lead on inclusion in Computer Science, he works to attract more diverse student cohorts into the field.

He currently collaborates with Research Software Engineers Michael Foster and Farhad Allian on the CITCOM project (2020-2025), which explores causal testing approaches for hard-to-test systems.