I lead the Practical and Actionable Software Engineering Research (PASER) group at Auburn University. Members of the PASER group work on software engineering research problems that have implications for practitioners.

Advisees

1. Pemsith Mendis, PhD Student, Auburn University Web
2. Shazibul Islam Shamim, PhD Student, Auburn University Web

Collaborators

1. Rahul Pandita, Staff Researcher, GitHub, USA Web
2. Chris Parnin, Principal Researcher, Microsoft Research, USA Web
3. Stacy Prowell, Distinguished Researcher, Oak Ridge National Lab, TN Web
4. Hossain Shahriar, Associate Professor, Kennesaw State University, GA Web
5. Anthony Skjellum, Director, SimCenter; Professor, Computer Science, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, TN Web
6. Fan Wu, Professor and Department Head, Tuskegee University Web

Alumni

1. Farzana Ahmed Bhuiyan (PhD), first appointment as research scientist at Meta (formerly known as Facebook)
2. Dibyendu Brinto Bose (BSc), first appointment as PhD student at Virginia Tech
3. Carlos Medrano (BSc), first appointment as site reliability engineer at Google
4. Justin Murphy (MSc), first appointment as security analyst at CISA, DHS
5. Raunak Shakya (MSc), first appointment as software engineer at MineralWare
6. Anceito Rivera (BSc), first appointment as software engineer at SAIC

Awarded External Grants

1. Co-PI, Hands-on Learning Modules for Software Supply Chain Security Education, U.S. National Security Agency (February 2023 - August 2025). PI: Hossain Shahriar, and Nazmus Sakib (Kennesaw State University), Amount: 75,000 USD (Total), 34,968 USD (Share of Auburn University).
2. Lead PI, SaTC: EDU: Authentic Learning Modules for DevOps Security Education, National Science Foundation (June 2022 - Sep 2025). Co-PI: Hossain Shahriar (Kennessaw State University) and Fan Wu (Tuskegee University), Amount: 399,882 USD (Total), 154,006 USD (Share of Auburn University).
3. Co-PI, Tennessee Tech Cybercorps Renewal: An Enahnced and Integrated Scholar Experience in Cybersecurity, National Science Foundation (July 2021 - July 2022), Amount: 1,917,081 USD. PI: Muhammad Ismail, Co-PI: Denis Ulybychev, Eric Brown, Maanak Gupta (Tennessee Tech University)
4. Lead PI, Cybersecurity Mini Grant (Sub-award), National Science Foundation (Dec 2020 - Mar 2021), Amount: 5,000 USD. Co-PI: Dennis Ulybychev (Tennessee Tech University)
5. Lead PI, SaTC: TTP: Small: eSLIC: Enhanced Security Static Analysis for Detecting Insecure Configuration Scripts, National Science Foundation (Oct 2020 - Sep 2023). Co-PI: Chris Parnin (NC State University), Amount: 444,720 USD (Total), 177,995 USD (Share of Auburn University).
6. Co-PI, EDGE Curriculum Development Grant, Tennessee Tech University (Jan 2020 - May 2020), PI: Maanak Gupta (Tennessee Tech University), Amount: 5,000 USD (Total)

Noteworthy Achievements of PASERs

1. Shazibul Islam Shamim, Bronze Award, Student Research Competition, ESEC/FSE 2021
2. Akond Rahman, Distinguished Reviewer, Mining Software Repositories (MSR) 2021
3. Akond Rahman, 2019-2020 Nominee for the Council of Graduate Schools/ProQuest Distinguished Dissertation Award, NC State University
4. Akond Rahman, 2019-2020 COE Distinguished Doctoral Dissertation Award, NC State University
5. Akond Rahman, 2019-2020 CSC Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award, NC State University
6. Farzana Ahamed Bhuiyan, Best Student Paper Award, 33rd Florida Artificial Intelligence Research Society (FLAIRS) 2020
7. Akond Rahman, ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award, ICSE 2019 - Technical Track
8. Akond Rahman, ACM SIGSOFT Best Paper Award, ICSE 2018 - Doctoral Symposium
9. Akond Rahman, Microsoft Open Source Challenge 2016 - Grand Prize
10. Shazibul Islam Shamim, Best Poster Award, Bioinformatics and Stringology Conference (BIOS) 2015

Open Source Software

1. SLI-KUBE for Kubernetes Manifests
2. LOPSUL for Python-based Open Source ML Projects
3. TAMA for Ansible
4. SLAC for Ansible
5. SLIC for Puppet
6. ACID for Puppet