Iftekhar Ahmed
Associate Professor, Department of Informatics, Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences
Faculty Member, Institute for Software Research
Biography
Iftekhar Ahmed, Ph.D., is Associate Professor in the Department of Informatics at the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at the University of California, Irvine, where he has been a faculty member since 2018. He also serves as Director of the Institute for Software Research. Ahmed received his Ph.D. in Computer Science from Oregon State University in 2018, where he was awarded IBM Ph.D. Fellowships in both 2016-2017 and 2017-2018.
Ahmed's research focuses on software engineering, combining testing, static analysis, socio-technical factors analysis, and machine learning approaches to improve software quality under real-world conditions. His work spans areas including software accessibility, commit message quality, code smells in quantum computing, and the application of large language models to software engineering tasks. He has secured research funding from the National Science Foundation, eBay, and other sources, with projects addressing topics such as automated accessibility testing, mental well-being of software developers, and the use of AI in software engineering education.
Ahmed has published extensively in software engineering venues, with papers appearing in IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, and conferences including ICSE, FSE, ASE, and CHI. He serves as Associate Editor for ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, IEEE Transactions on Reliability, and Empirical Software Engineering Journal. Ahmed received the Distinguished Reviewer Award from FSE in 2025 and has served on program committees for ICSE, FSE, ASE, and other conferences in the field.
Return to topEducation
- Ph.D. in Computer Science, Oregon State University, 2018
- B.S. in Computer Science and Engineering, Shah Jalal University of Science and Technology, 2007
Distinctions
- ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper Award, FSE, 2024
- IBM Ph.D. Fellowship, 2016-2017
- Distinguished Reviewer Award, FSE, 2025
- Distinguished Reviewer Award, ICPC, 2021
- Distinguished Reviewer Award, CHASE, 2025
- Distinguished Reviewer, TOSEM, 2019-2024
Areas of Expertise
- AI for Software Engineering
- Large Language Model Applications
- Developer Mental Wellbeing
- Code Quality Assessment
- Mutation Testing Techniques
- Fault Prediction Models
- Accessibility Testing Automation
Recent Publications
- Roselane Silva Farias, Iftekhar Ahmed, Eduardo Santana de Almeida, “What Makes a Great Software Quality Assurance Engineer?” (opens in new tab), IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, vol. 51, pp. 1153-1172, 2025.
- Iftekhar Ahmed, Aldeida Aleti, Haipeng Cai, Alexander Chatzigeorgiou, Pinjia He, Xing Hu, Mauro Pezzè, Denys Poshyvanyk, Xin Xia, “Artificial Intelligence for Software Engineering: The Journey so far and the Road ahead” (opens in new tab), ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM), vol. 34, pp. 1-25, 2025.
- Misu, Md Rakib Hossain, Jiawei Li, Adithya Bhattiprolu, Yang Liu, Eduardo Santana de Almeida, Iftekhar Ahmed, “Test smell: A parasitic energy consumer in software testing” (opens in new tab), Information and Software Technology (IST), vol. 181, 2025.
- Yaroslav Golubev, Agnia Sergeyuk, Timofey Bryksin, Iftekhar Ahmed, “Using AI-Based Coding Assistants in Practice: State of Affairs, Perceptions, and Ways Forward” (opens in new tab), Information and Software Technology (IST), vol. 178, 2025.
- Hyunjae Suh, Mahan Tafreshipour, Jiawei Li, Adithya Bhattiprolu, Iftekhar Ahmed, “An Empirical Study on Automatically Detecting AI-Generated Source Code: How Far Are We?” (opens in new tab), Proceedings International Conference on Software Engineering, pp. 859-871, 2025. Presented at IEEE/ACM 47th International Conference on Software Engineering.
- Aaron Imani, Iftekhar Ahmed, Mohammad Moshirpour, “Context Conquers Parameters: Outperforming Proprietary LLM in Commit Message Generation” (opens in new tab), Proceedings International Conference on Software Engineering, pp. 1844-1856, 2025. Presented at IEEE/ACM 47th International Conference on Software Engineering.
- Tafreshipour, Mahan, Aaron Imani, Eric Huang, Eduardo Almeida, Thomas Zimmermann, Iftekhar Ahmed, “Prompting in the Wild: An Empirical Study of Prompt Evolution in Software Repositories” (opens in new tab), Proceedings 2025 IEEE ACM 22nd International Conference on Mining Software Repositories MSR 2025, pp. 686-698, 2025. Presented at 22nd International conference on Mining Software Repositories.
- Balaji Balasubramaniam, Iftekhar Ahmed, Hamid Bagheri, Justin Bradley, “Carving Out Control Code: Automated Identification of Control Software in Autopilot Systems” (opens in new tab), ACM Transactions on Cyber-Physical Systems, vol. 8, pp. 1-20, 2024.
- Jiawei Li, David Faragó, Christian Petrov, Iftekhar Ahmed, “Only Diff Is Not Enough: Generating Commit Messages Leveraging Reasoning And Action Of Large Language Model”, FSE, pp. 745-766, 2024. Presented at 32nd ACM International Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering.
- Mahan Tafreshipour, Anmol Deshpande, Forough Mehralian, Iftekhar Ahmed, Sam Malek, “Ma11y: A Mutation Framework for Web Accessibility Testing” (opens in new tab), Issta 2024 Proceedings of the 33rd ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis, pp. 100-111, 2024. Presented at ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on Software Testing and Analysis.
- de Santana T.L., da Mota Silveira Neto P.A., de Almeida E.S., Ahmed I., “Bug Analysis in Jupyter Notebook Projects: An Empirical Study” (opens in new tab), ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, vol. 33, 2024.
- Eduardo Santana de Almeida, Iftekhar Ahmed, André van der Hoek, “Let's Go to the Whiteboard (Again): Perceptions From Software Architects on Whiteboard Architecture Meetings” (opens in new tab), IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE), vol. 49, pp. 4773-4795, 2023.
- Jiri Gesi, Xinyun Shen, Yunfan Geng, Qihong Chen, Iftekhar Ahmed, “Leveraging Feature Bias for Scalable Misprediction Explanation of Machine Learning Models” (opens in new tab), Proceedings International Conference on Software Engineering, pp. 1563-1574, 2023. Presented at IEEE/ACM 45th International Conference on Software Engineering.
- Jiawei Li, Iftekhar Ahmed, “Commit Message Matters: Investigating Impact and Evolution of Commit Message Quality” (opens in new tab), Proceedings International Conference on Software Engineering, pp. 806-817, 2023. Presented at IEEE/ACM 45th International Conference on Software Engineering.
- Qihong Chen, Rúben Câmara, José Campos, André Souto, Iftekhar Ahmed, “The Smelly Eight: An Empirical Study on the Prevalence of Code Smells in Quantum Computing” (opens in new tab), Proceedings International Conference on Software Engineering, pp. 358-370, 2023. Presented at IEEE/ACM 45th International Conference on Software Engineering.
- Rohith Pudari, Shiyuan Zhou, Iftekhar Ahmed, Zhuyun Dai, Shurui Zhou, “Aligning Documentation and Q&A Forum through Constrained Decoding with Weak Supervision” (opens in new tab), Proceedings 2023 IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution Icsme 2023, pp. 346-351, 2023. Presented at IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution.
- Raphael Pereira de Oliveira, Paulo Anselmo da Mota Silveira Neto, Qi Hong Chen, Eduardo Santana de Almeida, Iftekhar Ahmed, “Different, Really! A comparison of Highly-Configurable Systems and Single Systems” (opens in new tab), Information and Software Technology (IST), vol. 152, 2022.
- Shiyue Rong, Weisheng Wang, Umme Ayda Mannan, Eduardo Santana de Almeida, Shurui Zhou, Iftekhar Ahmed, “An empirical study of emoji use in software development communication” (opens in new tab), Information and Software Technology (IST), vol. 148, 2022.
- Dos Santos, Daniel Amador, Eduardo Santana de Almeida, Iftekhar Ahmed, “Investigating replication challenges through multiple replications of an experiment” (opens in new tab), Information and Software Technology (IST), vol. 147, 2022.
- Zixuan Feng, Amreeta Chatterjee, Anita Sarma, Iftekhar Ahmed, “A Case Study of Implicit Mentoring, its Prevalence, and Impact in Apache” (opens in new tab), Esec Fse 2022 Proceedings of the 30th ACM Joint Meeting European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, pp. 797-809, 2022. Presented at 30th ACM Joint Meeting on European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering.
Most Cited Publications
- Abdul Aziz Alshayban, Iftekhar Ahmed, Sam Malek, “Accessibility Issues in Android Apps: State of Affairs, Sentiments, and Ways Forward” (opens in new tab), Proceedings International Conference on Software Engineering, pp. 1323-1334, 2020. Presented at 42nd International Conference on Software Engineering.
- Elizamary Nascimento, Iftekhar Ahmed, Edson de Oliveira, Márcio Piedade Palheta, Igor Steinmacher, Tayana Conte, “Understanding Development Process of Machine Learning Systems: Challenges and Solutions” (opens in new tab), International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement, vol. 2019-Septemer, pp. 145-150, 2019. Presented at 13th ACM/IEEE International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement.
- Umme Ayda Mannan, Iftekhar Ahmed, Rana Almurshed, Danny Dig, Carlos Jensen, “Understanding Code Smells in Android Applications” (opens in new tab), Proceedings International Conference on Mobile Software Engineering and Systems Mobilesoft 2016, pp. 225-234, 2016. Presented at IEEE/ACM International Conference on Mobile Software Engineering and Systems.
- Ahmed I., Brindescu C., Mannan U.A., Jensen C., Sarma A., “An Empirical Examination of the Relationship between Code Smells and Merge Conflicts” (opens in new tab), International Symposium on Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement, vol. 2017-November, pp. 58-67, 2017.
- Rahul Gopinath, Mohammad Amin Alipour, Iftekhar Ahmed, Carlos Jensen, Alex Groce, “On the limits of mutation reduction strategies” (opens in new tab), Proceedings International Conference on Software Engineering, vol. 14-22-May-2016, pp. 511-522, 2016. Presented at 38th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering.
- Rahul Gopinath, Mohammad Amin Alipour, Iftekhar Ahmed, Carlos Jensen, Alex Groce, “How Hard Does Mutation Analysis Have to Be, Anyway?” (opens in new tab), 2015 IEEE 26th International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering ISSRE 2015, pp. 216-227, 2015. Presented at 26th IEEE International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering.
- Rahul Gopinath, Iftekhar Ahmed, Mohammad Amin Alipour, Carlos Jensen, Alex Groce, “Mutation Reduction Strategies Considered Harmful” (opens in new tab), IEEE Transactions on Reliability, vol. 66, no. 3, pp. 854-874, 2017.
- Iftekhar Ahmed, Rahul Gopinath, Caius Brindescu, Alex Groce, Carlos Jensen, “Can Testedness be Effectively Measured?” (opens in new tab), Proceedings of the ACM SIGSOFT Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, vol. 13-18-November-2016, pp. 547-558, 2016. Presented at 24th ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering.
- Tongjie Wang, Yaroslav Golubev, Oleg Smirnov, Jiawei Li, Timofey Bryksin, Iftekhar Ahmed, “PyNose: A Test Smell Detector For Python” (opens in new tab), Proceedings 2021 36th IEEE ACM International Conference on Automated Software Engineering Ase 2021, pp. 593-605, 2021. Presented at 36th IEEE/ACM conference on Automated Software Engineering.
- Paulo Anselmo da Mota Silveira Neto, Umme Ayda Mannan, Eduardo Santana de Almeida, Nachiappan Nagappan, David Lo, Pavneet Singh Kochhar, Cuiyun Gao, Iftekhar Ahmed, “A Deep Dive into the Impact of COVID-19 on Software Development” (opens in new tab), IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering (TSE), vol. 48, pp. 1-20, 2021.
Contact Information
Email: iftekha@uci.edu
Phone: (949) 824-6444
Address: 2438 Samueli Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering, Irvine, CA 92697-3440
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Last updated on 3/19/2026.