FSE 2026 in Montréal

Created on July 09, 2026 , last updated on October 13, 2026

2026

Around twenty FSE 2026 student volunteers in navy conference shirts, posing in front of the arched gate of the Maison mère des Sœurs Grises on Concordia's campus in Montréal.

I had a great week at the ACM International Conference on the Foundations of Software Engineering (FSE 2026), held from 5 to 9 July on Concordia’s SGW campus in downtown Montréal. It was a real pleasure to have a top software engineering conference here in my own city, which has a very large software engineering research community through SEMTL and SERIQ. I served as Student Volunteer Co-Chair together with Diego Costa.

The student volunteers

We had around 50 student volunteers this year. Student volunteers are a big part of what keeps a conference running smoothly, and they also get to meet researchers and see the community up close. Diego and I really appreciated their hard work and time. I had many comments that they were all doing great, and I think everything was a success.

The Oakes Lab at FSE

Two members of the lab, Kérian Fiter and Fatima Aguel, joined the volunteer team. For Fatima, this came in the middle of her Mitacs Globalink internship with us, so it was a nice chance to see a large international conference first-hand.

Mouna Dhaouadi also presented our paper Automated Extraction and Analysis of Developer’s Rationale in Open Source Software, with Michalis Famelis and me. This work comes from Mouna’s research with Michalis at the Université de Montréal, and I’m happy that Mouna is now a post-doctoral researcher at Polytechnique Montréal.

Bentley Oakes, Kérian Fiter, and Fatima Aguel standing beside the FSE 2026 registration sign in Montréal.
With Kérian Fiter and Fatima Aguel at FSE 2026 in Montréal.

Highlights

One highlight was seeing the student volunteers help around 800 researchers dodge construction and find their way across nine floors and three buildings at Concordia.

The keynotes were another highlight. I especially enjoyed Mary Shaw’s (Carnegie Mellon University) keynote, “Correctness, confidence, and context: Framing software assurance in the AI age”, and Dickson Tsai’s (Anthropic) keynote, “Harness Design for Increasingly Capable Models: How Newer Claude Code Features Shape Agent Trajectories”. All of the keynotes are listed on the FSE 2026 keynotes page.

Finally, a big thank you to Diego for being a great co-chair, and to the general chairs, Foutse Khomh (Polytechnique Montréal) and Shin Hwei Tan (Concordia University), for a wonderful conference.