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Causal Methods in Software Engineering (CauSE 2025)

Workshop CauSE 2025

Description

This workshop is organized in the context of the ACM International Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE2025). Mon 23 - Fri 27 June 2025 Trondheim, Norway. https://conf.researchr.org/home/fse-2025

Motivation

Despite their potential, causal methods have not yet been leveraged by the software engineering community. While preliminary studies demonstrated their benefit in specific areas, their broad and systematic exploitation for software engineering is still far from coming. The objective of this workshop is to provide the first platform for participants to share their research, experiences, and insights on causal inference methods and their applications in software engineering. The broader aim is to foster networking and open new collaboration opportunities, encouraging the development of a new strong community.

This workshop aims to bring together researchers, practitioners, and students to explore the growing field of causal inference and, more broadly, causal AI (including causal discovery, mediation analysis, counterfactual analysis, root-cause and causal attribution analysis) in software engineering. Causal inference methods allow the identification and estimation of causal effects from observational data, distinguishing between spurious correlations and causal effects. Despite a growing interest in the topic, the application of such methods in software engineering is not widespread, and there is a need to foster a community to exchange and promote scientific activities on the topic.

Workshop goals

The workshop will provide a platform for participants to share their research, experiences, and insights on causal inference methods and their applications in software engineering. It will also facilitate networking and collaboration opportunities, encouraging the development of a strong community.

Call for papers:

For convenience, you can download the Call for Papers as a text file here: CFP.txt. It contains the same information as shown here.

Topics of interest:

The workshop intends to keep the scope of the application use cases as broad as possible. We don’t want to restrict the type of causal methods applied and want this workshop to be an open stage for SE researchers to discuss which causal approach fits best a given use case. The types of work expected include (but are not limited to) proof of concept, benchmarks, empirical studies, lessons learned reports, literature reviews, etc.

Topics include the application of causal reasoning methods, such as causal discovery, causal inference, and the causal treatment of machine learning (Causal Machine Learning, Causal Reinforcement Learning), to:

Manuscript information:

Submitted papers should present original, unpublished work, relevant to one of the topics above. CauSE 2025 will accept:

Submissions must be in English and in PDF format. At the time of submission, all papers must conform to the FSE 2025 format and submission guidelines. All submissions will be refereed by three members of the program committee. Accepted submissions will be published in the conference’s electronic proceedings and at the ACM Digital Library. At least one author of each accepted paper must register for, attend the workshop, and present the results.

Important Dates:

https://cause2025.hotcrp.com/

Workshop agenda (WIP)

Depending upon the number of submission the workshop will be either half a day of a full day.

Program Committee

Organizers and contacts

Dr. Julien Siebert is a Senior Expert in Artificial Intelligence at the Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering, Kaiserslautern, Germany. He is guest editor of the special issue on Causal Modeling and Inference in Software Engineering (Information and Software Technology). His research interests include software engineering methods for artificial intelligence and complex systems.

Prof. Roberto Pietrantuono is an Associate Professor at the Federico II University of Naples, working in the Dependable Systems and Software Engineering Research Team (DESSERT). He is associate editor of Transactions on Services Computing and Software Quality Journal. He is co-founder of Critiware s.r.l., a company working on critical systems engineering. He currently coordinates an EU MSCA Project (uDEVOPS) on SQA for microservice systems. His research interests include software engineering, software reliability, software testing and AI systems engineering.

Dr. Neil Walkinshaw is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Sheffield. His research focuses on software quality assurance, particularly “black-box” components, and he specializes in applying Machine Learning and data analysis algorithms to testing, reverse-engineering, and safety-case assessment. He received a grant from CITCoM (2021-2024) for the project “Causal Inference for Testing of Computational Models.”

Luca Giamattei is researcher at the Federico II University of Naples, working in the Dependable Systems and Software Engineering Research Team (DESSERT). His research interests encompass the use of causal reasoning in software testing.