Hi, I’m Owain Parry, a Research Associate in the AI x Software Engineering & Testing (ASET) group within 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. I currently work on the EPSRC-funded project Test FLARE (Test FLakiness Automated Reproduction and Explanation), focusing on the automated analysis 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) programme. (Email me)

Publications

2026

• O. Parry, G. M. Kapfhammer, M. Hilton, and P. McMinn. Test Flimsiness: Characterizing Flakiness Induced by Mutation to the Code Under Test. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), to appear, 2026. (PDF)

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 Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering Companion (EASE Companion), pages 61–66, 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), pages 476–487, 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. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, 31(1), 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 Conference on Software Engineering Workshops (ICSEW), 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

In 2025, my teaching practice was recognised with the award of Associate Fellowship of the Higher Education Academy.

Service

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

• Guest editor for Flaky Tests and Beyond: Confronting Non-Determinism in Automated Testing.
• Organising committee member for International Flaky Tests Workshop 2024.
• Organising committee member for International Flaky Tests Workshop 2025.
• Reviewer for Information and Software Technology.
• Reviewer for Journal of Systems and Software.
• Reviewer for Science of Computer Programming.
• Reviewer for Software Testing, Verification Reliability.
• Reviewer for Transactions on Software Engineering.
• Session chair for International Conference on Automation of Software Test 2022.
• Steering committee member for International Flaky Tests Workshop 2026.
• Student volunteer for International Conference on Software Engineering 2022.
• Student volunteer for International Conference on Software Testing, Verification and Validation 2023.

Media Appearances

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

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