Hi, I’m Owain Parry, a Research Associate at the School of Computer Science at the University of Sheffield. I completed my PhD in 2023 with a thesis titled Understanding and Mitigating Flaky Software Test Cases, supervised by Phil McMinn. I currently work on the EPSRC-funded project Test FLARE (Test Flakiness Automated Reproduction and Explanation), focusing on the automated analysis and reproducibility of flaky tests. My broader research interests include quantum computing, with a particular focus on quantum software engineering, developed through my involvement with the RoaRQ (Robust and Reliable Quantum Computing) project. (Email me)

Publications

2025

• O. Parry and P. McMinn. QAOA-PCA: Enhancing Efficiency in the Quantum Approximate Optimization Algorithm via Principal Component Analysis. In Proceedings of The International Workshop on Empirical Studies for Quantum Software Engineering (E-QSE), to appear, 2025. (PDF)

• O. Parry, G. M. Kapfhammer, M. Hilton, and P. McMinn. Systemic Flakiness: An Empirical Analysis of Co-Occurring Flaky Test Failures. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering (EASE), to appear, 2025. (PDF)

2024

• M. Gruber, M. F. Roslan, O. Parry, F. Scharnböck, P. McMinn, and G. Fraser. Do Automatic Test Generation Tools Generate Flaky Tests? In Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), pages 1–12, 2024. (PDF)

2023

• O. Parry, G. M. Kapfhammer, M. Hilton, and P. McMinn. Empirically evaluating flaky test detection techniques combining test case rerunning and machine learning models. Empirical Software Engineering, 28(72), 2023. (PDF)

2022

• O. Parry, G. M. Kapfhammer, M. Hilton, and P. McMinn. What Do Developer-Repaired Flaky Tests Tell Us About the Effectiveness of Automated Flaky Test Detection? In Proceedings of the International Conference on Automation of Software Test (AST), pages 160–164, 2022. (PDF)
• O. Parry, G. M. Kapfhammer, M. Hilton, and P. McMinn. Surveying the Developer Experience of Flaky Tests. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Engineering: Software Engineering in Practice (ICSE-SEIP), pages 253–262, 2022. (PDF)
• O. Parry, G. M. Kapfhammer, M. Hilton, and P. McMinn. Evaluating Features for Machine Learning Detection of Order- and Non-Order-Dependent Flaky Tests. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation (ICST), pages 93–104, 2022. (PDF)

2021

• O. Parry, G. M. Kapfhammer, M. Hilton, and P. McMinn. A survey of flaky tests. Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, 31(1):1–74, 2021. (PDF)

2020

• O. Parry, G. M. Kapfhammer, M. Hilton, and P. McMinn. Flake it ‘till you make it: Using automated repair to induce and fix latent test flakiness. In Proceedings of the International Workshop on Automated Program Repair (APR), pages 11–12, 2020. (PDF)

Teaching

During my time as a PhD student, I worked as a Graduate Teaching Assistant at the University of Sheffield. My duties included supporting lab sessions, marking assignments, and delivering seminars to undergraduate students on the following modules:

• COM1001 Introduction to Software Engineering
• COM2107 Logic in Computer Science
• COM2109 Automata, Computation and Complexity
• COM3529 Software Testing and Analysis

Service

Throughout my career, I have served the software engineering research community in the following ways:

• Reviewer for Information and Software Technology.
• Reviewer for Software Testing, Verification Reliability.
• Reviewer for Transactions on Software Engineering.
• Student volunteer for the International Conference on Software Engineering 2022.
• Student volunteer for the International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation 2023.
• Session chair for the International Conference on Automation of Software Test 2022.
• Co-organiser for the International Flaky Tests Workshop 2024.
• Co-organiser for the International Flaky Tests Workshop 2025.

Media Appearances

The work of myself and my collaborators has been featured on the following media outlets:

• Guest on Talk Python Podcast, episode Taming Flaky Tests.
• Featured on departmental blog, article Researchers find new hope through machine learning for dreaded ‘flaky test’.
• Featured on Engineering Enablement, article How Flaky Tests Impact Developers.