Denini Gabriel Silva

Assistant Professor at UFRPE. Software testing and program analysis.

prof_pic3.jpeg

UFRPE

Recife, PE, Brazil.

I am an Assistant Professor at the Federal Rural University of Pernambuco (UFRPE), where I teach Compilers, Theory of Computation, and software engineering courses. I received my Ph.D. in Computer Science from CIn-UFPE, advised by Marcelo d’Amorim.

My research interests are in software testing and program analysis, with a focus on flaky tests. I also work on runtime verification, test parallelization, and the reliability of build and execution environments.

I am a member of the Software Testing and Analysis Research (STAR) group, where I have helped build Shaker, which adds noise to the machine to expose concurrency-related flaky tests faster; Shipwright, for Dockerfile repair; and PASTE, for soundy parallelization of test execution. More recently, I have worked on PyMOP, a runtime verification tool for Python, and on cross-OS portability issues in Python projects.

I am happy to talk with UFRPE students interested in software testing, program analysis, or empirical software engineering.

news

Jun 22, 2026 Served as a Reviewer for IEEE TSE
Mar 24, 2026 PhD Thesis Successfully Defended
Mar 23, 2026 Approved in the Public Selection Process at UFRPE
Mar 18, 2026 Tool Demo Paper Accepted at FSE 2026
Jan 14, 2026 Paper Accepted at MSR 2026

selected publications

  1. SAST
    The Vocabulary of Flaky Tests in Swift
    João Medeiros, Denini Silva, and Breno Miranda
    In Proceedings of the 11th Brazilian Symposium on Systematic and Automated Software Testing (SAST), acceptance rate: 29% [17/58] , 2026
    PDF
  2. SAST
    Evaluating Shaker for Flaky Test Detection in Python Projects
    Gabriela Leal, Denini Silva, and Leopoldo Teixeira
    In Proceedings of the 11th Brazilian Symposium on Systematic and Automated Software Testing (SAST), acceptance rate: 29% [17/58] , 2026
    PDF
  3. FSE
    PyMOP: A Runtime Verification Tool for Python
    Zhuohang Shen, Mohammed Yaseen, Kevin Guan, and 3 more authors
    In ACM International Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering - Tool Demonstrations, Montreal, Canada, acceptance rate: 48.6% [36/74] , Jul 2026
    PDF
  4. MSR
    An Empirical Analysis of Cross-OS Portability Issues in Python Projects
    Denini Silva, MohamadAli Farahat, and Marcelo d’Amorim
    In International Conference on Mining Software Repositories, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, acceptance rate: 34% [48/140] , Apr 2026
    PDF
  5. TSE
    The Effects of Computational Resources on Flaky Tests
    Denini Silva, Martin Gruber, Satyajit Gokhale, and 6 more authors
    IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Apr 2024
    DOI PDF
  6. ASE
    Shaker: a Tool for Detecting More Flaky Tests Faster
    Marcello Cordeiro, Denini Silva, Leopoldo Teixeira, and 2 more authors
    In IEEE/ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering (Tool Demonstrations), Melbourne City, Australia [Virtual, due to COVID-19], acceptance rate: 47.2% [17/36] , Nov 2021
    DOI PDF Video Code
  7. ICSME
    Soundy Automated Parallelization of Test Execution
    Shouvick Mondal, Denini Silva, and Marcelo d’Amorim
    In 2021 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME), acceptance rate: 24% [43/179] , Nov 2021
    DOI PDF Code
  8. ICSE
    Shipwright: A Human-in-the-Loop System for Dockerfile Repair
    Jordan Henkel, Denini Silva, Leopoldo Teixeira, and 2 more authors
    In IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering, Madrid, Spain [Virtual, due to COVID-19], acceptance rate: 22.9% [138/602] , May 2021
    arXiv PDF Code
  9. ICSME
    Shake It! Detecting Flaky Tests Caused by Concurrency with Shaker
    Denini Silva, Leopoldo Teixeira, and Marcelo d’Amorim
    In IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution, Adelaide, Australia [Virtual, due to COVID-19], acceptance rate: 28.9% [58/201] , Sep 2020
    DOI PDF Video