I obtained my PhD in Science in 2013 at the University of Mons (UMONS), Belgium. I have authored many well-cited publications related to the maintenance and evolution of software ecosystems in top software engineering conferences and journals. In 2022, I became a tenured F.R.S.-FNRS research associate affiliated with the Software Engineering Lab of the Computer Science Department at the Faculty of Sciences of the University of Mons (UMONS), Belgium. My current research focuses on analysing and improving workflow automation in continuous collaborative open source software engineering.
- Contact me via alexandre.decan@umons.ac.be or alexandre.decan@lexpage.net.
- Download my curriculum vitae.
- My projects on GitHub.
- My Google Scholar profile.
2026 - Automation and Reuse Practices in GitHub Actions Workflows: A Practitioner's Perspective Hassan Onsori Delicheh, Guillaume Cardoen, Alexandre Decan, Tom Mens in Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology, 10.1145/3806833, 2026 Download
2026 - An Empirical Study of the Evolution of GitHub Actions Workflows Pooya Rostami Mazrae, Alexandre Decan, Tom Mens, Mairieli Wessel in Journal of Systems and Software, 10.1016/j.jss.2026.112824, 2026 Download
2025 - A Bot Identification Model and Tool Based on GitHub Activity Sequences Natarajan Chidambaram, Alexandre Decan, Tom Mens in Journal of Systems and Software, 10.1016/j.jss.2024.112287, 2025 Download
2023 - On the Outdatedness of Workflows in the GitHub Actions Ecosystem Alexandre Decan, Tom Mens, Hassan Onsori Delicheh in Journal of Systems and Software, doi.org/10.1016/j.jss.2023.111827, 2023 Download
2023 - On the usage, co-usage and migration of CI/CD tools: a qualitative analysis Pooya Rostami Mazrae, Tom Mens, Mehdi Golzadeh, Alexandre Decan in Empirical Software Engineering 28, 52, 10.1007/s10664-022-10285-5, 2023 Download
2022 - Recognizing bot activity in collaborative software development Mehdi Golzadeh, Tom Mens, Alexandre Decan, Eleni Constantinou, Natarajan Chidambaram in IEEE Software Special Issue: Bots in Software Engineering, 10.1109/MS.2022.3178601, 2022 Download
2022 - On the Impact of Security Vulnerabilities in the npm and RubyGems Dependency Networks Ahmed Zerouali, Tom Mens, Alexandre Decan, Coen De Roover in Empirical Software Engineering, 10.1007/s10664-022-10154-1, 2022 Download
2021 - Back to the Past - Analysing Backporting Practices in Package Dependency Networks Alexandre Decan, Tom Mens, Ahmed Zerouali, Coen De Roover in IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 10.1109/TSE.2021.3112204, 2021 Download
2021 - Lost in Zero Space - An Empirical Comparison of 0.y.z Releases in Software Package Distributions Alexandre Decan, Tom Mens in Science of Computer Programming, 10.1016/j.scico.2021.102656, 2021 Download
2021 - A ground-truth dataset and classification model for detecting bots in GitHub issue and PR comments Mehdi Golzadeh, Alexandre Decan, Damien Legay, Tom Mens in Journal of Systems and Software, 10.1016/j.jss.2021.110911, 2021 Download
2021 - A multi-dimensional analysis of technical lag in Debian-based Docker images Ahmed Zerouali, Tom Mens, Alexandre Decan, Jesus Gonzalez-Barahona and Gregorio Robles in Empirical Software Engineering, 26,10.1007/s10664-020-09908-6, 2021 Download
2020 - Sismic - A Python library for statechart execution and testing Alexandre Decan, Tom Mens in SoftwareX, 10.1016/j.softx.2020.100590, 2020 Download
2020 - GAP: Forecasting Commit Activity in git Projects Alexandre Decan, Eleni Constantinou, Tom Mens, Henrique Rocha in Journal of Systems and Software, 10.1016/j.jss.2020.110573, 2020 Download
2019 - What Do Package Dependencies Tell Us about Semantic Versioning? Alexandre Decan, Tom Mens in IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, 10.1109/TSE.2019.2918315, 2019 Download
2019 - A Formal Framework for Measuring Technical Lag in Component Repositories - and its application to npm Ahmed Zerouali, Tom Mens, Jesus Gonzalez-Barahona, Alexandre Decan, Eleni Constantinou, Gregorio Robles in Journal of Software: Evolution and Process, 10.1002/smr.2157, 2019 Download
2018 - A Method for Testing and Validating Executable Statechart Models Tom Mens, Alexandre Decan, Nikolaos Spanoudakis in Software and Systems Modeling, 10.1007/s10270-018-0676-3, 2018 Download
2018 - An Empirical Comparison of Dependency Network Evolution in Seven Software Packaging Ecosystems Alexandre Decan, Tom Mens, Philippe Grosjean in Empirical Software Engineering, 23, 10.1007/s10664-017-9589-y, 2018 Download
2012 - Certain Conjunctive Query Answering in SQL Alexandre Decan, Fabian Pijcke, Jef Wijsen in Lecture Notes in Computer Science, 7520, p154-167, 2012 Download
2012 - An Aperiodicity Problem for Multiwords Véronique Bruyère, Olivier Carton, Alexandre Decan, Olivier Gauwin, Jef Wijsen in RAIRO : Theoretical Informatics and Applications, 46, 1, p33-50, 2012 Download
2026 - On the GitHub Actions Language: Usage, Evolution, and Workflow Reliability Aref Talebzadeh Bardsiri, Alexandre Decan, Tom Mens in 42nd IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME), Benevento, Italy, 2026 Download
2026 - GHAgentFiles: A dataset of coding agent file histories in GitHub repositories Guillaume Cardoen, Tom Mens, Alexandre Decan in 42nd IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME), Benevento, Italy, 2026 Download
2026 - GHARuns: A large dataset of GitHub Actions workflow execution metadata Aref Talebzadeh Bardsiri, Tom Mens, Alexandre Decan in 42nd IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME), Benevento, Italy, 2026 Download
2026 - An Empirical Analysis of Code Clones in GitHub Actions Workflows Guillaume Cardoen, Tom Mens, Alexandre Decan in 33rd International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER), Limassol, Cyprus, 2026 Download
2025 - A Dataset of Contributor Activities in the NumFocus Open-Source Community Youness Hourri, Alexandre Decan, Tom Mens in 22nd International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR), Ottawa, Canada, 2025 Download
2024 - An Overview and Catalogue of Dependency Challenges in Open Source Software Package Registries Tom Mens, Alexandre Decan in 23rd Belgium-Netherlands Software Evolution Workshop (BENEVOL), Namur, Belgium, 2024 Download
2024 - Quantifying Security Issues in Reusable JavaScript Actions in GitHub Workflows Hassan Onsori Delicheh, Alexandre Decan, Tom Mens in 21st International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR), Lisbon, Portugal, 2024 Download
2024 - gawd: A Differencing Tool for GitHub Actions Workflows Pooya Rostami Mazrae, Alexandre Decan, Tom Mens in 21st International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR), Lisbon, Portugal, 2024 Download
2024 - RABBIT: A tool for identifying bot accounts based on their recent GitHub event history Natarajan Chidambaram, Tom Mens, Alexandre Decan in 21st International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR), Lisbon, Portugal, 2024 Download
2024 - A dataset of GitHub Actions workflow histories Guillaume Cardoen, Tom Mens, Alexandre Decan in 21st International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR), Lisbon, Portugal, 2024 Download
2023 - A Preliminary Study of GitHub Actions Workflow Changes Pooya Rostami Mazrae, Alexandre Decan, Tom Mens, Mairieli Wessel in Seminar Series on Advanced Techniques & Tools for Software Evolution (SATToSE), Salerno, Italy, 2023 Download
2023 - Distinguishing Bots from Human Developers Based on their GitHub Activity Types Natarajan Chidambaram, Alexandre Decan, Tom Mens in Seminar Series on Advanced Techniques & Tools for Software Evolution (SATToSE), Salerno, Italy, 2023 Download
2023 - A Preliminary Study of GitHub Actions Dependencies Hassan Onsori Delicheh, Alexandre Decan, Tom Mens in Seminar Series on Advanced Techniques & Tools for Software Evolution (SATToSE), Salerno, Italy, 2023 Download
2023 - A Dataset of Bot and Human Activities in GitHub Natarajan Chidambaram, Alexandre Decan, Tom Mens in 20th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR), Melbourne, Australia, 2023 Download
2022 - Patched Clones and Missed Patches among the Divergent Variants of a Software Family Poedjadevie Ramkisoen, John Businge, Brent van Bladel, Alexandre Decan, Serge Demeyer, Coen De Roover, Foutse Khomh in ACM Joint European Software Engineering Conference and Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering (ESEC/FSE), Singapore, 2022 Download
2022 - On the Use of GitHub Actions in Software Development Repositories Alexandre Decan, Tom Mens, Pooya Rostami Mazrae, Mehdi Golzadeh in 38th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME), Limassol, Cyprus, 2022 Download
2022 - On the accuracy of bot detection techniques Mehdi Golzadeh, Alexandre Decan, Natarajan Chidambaram in 4th Workshop on Bots in Software Engineering (BotSE), IEEE/ACM ICSEW 2022, Pittsburgh, USA, 2022 Download
2022 - Leveraging Predictions From Multiple Repositories to Improve Bot Detection Natarajan Chidambaram, Alexandre Decan, Mehdi Golzadeh in 4th Workshop on Bots in Software Engineering (BotSE), IEEE/ACM ICSEW 2022, Pittsburgh, USA, 2022 Download
2022 - On the rise and fall of CI services in GitHub Mehdi Golzadeh, Alexandre Decan, Tom Mens in 29th IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER), Honolulu, Hawai, 2022 Download
2022 - Variant Forks - Motivations and Impediments John Businge, Ahmed Zerouali, Alexandre Decan, Tom Mens, Serge Demeyer, Coen De Roover in 29th IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution and Reengineering (SANER), Honolulu, Hawai, 2022 Download
2021 - Identifying bot activity in GitHub pull request and issue comments Mehdi Golzadeh, Alexandre Decan, Eleni Constantinou, Tom Mens in 3rd Workshop on Bots in Software Engineering (BotSE), IEEE/ACM ICSEW 2021, Madrid, Spain (Virtual), 2021 Download
2021 - A Quantitative Assessment of Package Freshness in Linux Distributions Damien Legay, Alexandre Decan, Tom Mens in 4th International Workshop on Software Health (SoHeal), IEEE/ACM ICSEW 2021, Madrid, Spain (Virtual), 2021 Download
2020 - How Magic is Zero? An Empirical Analysis of Initial Development Releases in Three Software Package Distributions Alexandre Decan, Tom Mens in 3rd International Workshop on Software Health (SoHeal20), IEEE/ACM ICSEW 2020, Seoul, Republic of Korea, 2020 Download
2020 - On Package Freshness in Linux Distributions Damien Legay, Alexandre Decan, Tom Mens in 36th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME), Adelaide, Australia, 2020 Download
2020 - Bot or not? Detecting bots in GitHub pull request activity based on comment similarity Mehdi Golzadeh, Damien Legay, Alexandre Decan, Tom Mens in 2nd Workshop on Bots in Software Engineering (BotSE), IEEE/ACM ICSEW 2020, Seoul, Republic of Korea, 2020 Download
2020 - An Empirical Investigation of Forks as Variants in the npm Package Distribution John Businge, Alexandre Decan, Ahmed Zerouali, Tom Mens, Serge Demeyer in 19th Belgium-Netherlands Software Evolution Workshop (BENEVOL), Luxembourg, Luxembourg, 2020 Download
2020 - Evaluating a Bot Detection Model on Git Commit Messages Mehdi Golzadeh, Alexandre Decan, Tom Mens in 19th Belgium-Netherlands Software Evolution Workshop (BENEVOL), Luxembourg, Luxembourg, 2020 Download
2019 - Towards an Understanding of the Impact of Badges in GitHub Repositories Damien Legay, Alexandre Decan, Tom Mens in 18th Belgium-Netherlands Software Evolution Workshop (BENEVOL), Brussels, Belgium, 2019 Download
2019 - On the Effect of Discussions on Pull Request Decisions Mehdi Golzadeh, Alexandre Decan, Tom Mens in 18th Belgium-Netherlands Software Evolution Workshop (BENEVOL), Brussels, Belgium, 2019 Download
2018 - On the Evolution of Technical Lag in the npm Package Dependency Network Alexandre Decan, Tom Mens, Eleni Constantinou in 34th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance and Evolution (ICSME), Madrid, Spain, 2018 Download
2018 - On the Impact of Security Vulnerabilities in the npm Package Dependency Network Alexandre Decan, Tom Mens, Eleni Constantinou in 15th International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR), Gothenburg, Sweden, 2018 Download
2018 - Breaking the Borders: An Investigation of Cross-Ecosystem Software Packages Eleni Constantinou, Alexandre Decan, Tom Mens in 17th Belgium-Netherlands Software Evolution Workshop (BENEVOL), Delft, the Netherlands, 2018 Download
2018 - On the Impact of Pull Request Decisions on Future Contributions Damien Legay, Alexandre Decan, Tom Mens in 17th Belgium-Netherlands Software Evolution Workshop (BENEVOL), Delft, the Netherlands, 2018 Download
2017 - An Empirical Comparison of Dependency Issues in OSS Packaging Ecosystems Alexandre Decan, Tom Mens, Maëlick Claes in 24th IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution, and Reengineering (SANER), Klagenfurt, Austria, 2017 Download
2017 - On the Interaction of Relational Database Access Technologies in Open Source Java Projects Alexandre Decan, Mathieu Goeminne, Tom Mens in Seminar Series on Advanced Techniques & Tools for Software Evolution (SATToSE), 1820, 26-35, Mons, Belgium, 2017 Download
2016 - On the Topology of Package Dependency Networks: a comparison of three programming language ecosystems Alexandre Decan, Tom Mens, Maëlick Claes in ECSAW'16: Proceedings of the 10th European Conference on Software Architecture Workshops, Copenhagen, Denmark, 2016 Download
2016 - When GitHub meets CRAN: An Analysis of Inter-Repository Package Dependency Problems Alexandre Decan, Tom Mens, Maëlick Claes, Philippe Grosjean in 23rd IEEE International Conference on Software Analysis, Evolution, and Reengineering (SANER), Osaka, Japan, 2016 Download
2015 - On the Development and Distribution of R Packages: An Empirical Analysis of the R Ecosystem Alexandre Decan, Tom Mens, Maëlick Claes, Philippe Grosjean in International Workshop on Software Ecosystems (IWSECO), 2015 Download
2014 - Co-evolving Code-related and Database-related Changes in Data-intensive Software System Mathieu Goeminne, Alexandre Decan, Tom Mens in IEEE CSMR-WCRE 2014 Software Evolution Week, 353-357, Antwerpen, Belgium, 2014 Download
2010 - A Variant of Pattern Matching for Multiwords Véronique Bruyère, Olivier Carton, Alexandre Decan, Olivier Gauwin, Jef Wijsen in Journées Montoises en Informatique Théorique, Amiens, France, 2010 Download
2009 - On First-Order Query Rewriting for Incomplete Database Histories Véronique Bruyère, Alexandre Decan, Jef Wijsen in 16th International Symposium on Temporal Representation and Reasoning, TIME 2009, 54-61, Bressanone, Italie, 2009 Download
2008 - On First-Order Query Rewriting for Incomplete Database Histories Alexandre Decan, Jef Wijsen in International Workshop on Logic in Databases (LID), 2008 Download
2023 - The GitHub Development Workflow Automation Ecosystems Mairieli Wessel, Tom Mens, Alexandre Decan, Pooya Rostami Mazrae in Software Ecosystems: Tooling and Analytics, Springer International Publishing, 2023 Download
2017 - Inter-component Dependency Issues in Software Ecosystems Maëlick Claes, Alexandre Decan, Tom Mens in Software Technology : 10 Years of Innovation, IEEE Computer, John Wiley & Sons/IEEE Press, New York, NY, 2017 Download
2017 - Analysing the Evolution of Database Usage in Data-Intensive Software Systems Loup Meurice, Mathieu Goeminne, Tom Mens, Csaba Nagy, Alexandre Decan, Anthony Cleve in Software Technology : 10 Years of Innovation, IEEE Computer, John Wiley & Sons/IEEE Press, New York, NY, 2017 Download
2013 - Certain Query Answering in First-Order Languages University of Mons, Belgium, 2 July 2013 Download
MSR 2025 Distinguished Paper 22nd International Conference on Mining Software Repositories Distinguished paper award for A Dataset of Contributor Activities in the NumFocus Open-Source Community Download
ICSME 2022 Distinguished Paper 38th IEEE International Conference on Software Maintenance & Evolution Distinguished paper award for On the Use of GitHub Actions in Software Development Repositories Download
2023 - Mandat d'Impulsion Scientifique On the impact of workflow automation solutions on continuous collaborative open source software engineering F.R.S.-FNRS, 2023-2025, F.4515.23, 428.991€
2022 - Chercheur Qualifié Analysing and improving workflow automation in continuous collaborative open source software engineering F.R.S.-FNRS, 2022, 1.C.024.23F, 20.000€
Aref Talebzadeh On the impact of workflow automation on continuous collaborative open source software engineering University of Mons, Belgium, 2024 (ongoing)
Guillaume Cardoen On workflow automation in open source software repositories University of Mons, Belgium, 2023 (ongoing)
Hassan Onsori Delicheh Empirical analysis, recommendations and improvements for software development workflow automation ecosystems University of Mons, Belgium, 2022 (ongoing)
Understanding the Evolution of GitHub Actions Automation Workflows Pooya Rostami Mazrae, 6 May 2026, University of Mons, Belgium
Improving Bot Identification in Collaborative Software Development on GitHub Natarajan Chidambaram, 22 May 2025, University of Mons, Belgium
Identifying Development Bots in Social Coding Platforms Mehdi Golzadeh, 22 June 2023, University of Mons, Belgium
Dealing with Inconsistencies in Knowledge Bases Horacio Tellez Perez, 23 September 2021, University of Mons, Belgium
A Measurement Framework for Analyzing Technical Lag in Open-Source Software Ecosystems Ahmed Zerouali, 4 September 2019, University of Mons, Belgium
Theoretical and Practical Methods for Consistent Query Answering in the Relational Data Model Fabian Pijcke, 8 February 2018, University of Mons, Belgium
BENEVOL 2026 Program Committee Chair 25th Belgium-Netherlands Software Evolution Workshop 26-27 November 2026, Madrid, Spain https://benevol.github.io/2026/
BENEVOL 2022 21st Belgium-Netherlands Software Evolution Workshop 12-13 September 2022, Mons, Belgium https://benevol2022.github.io
TIME 2017 24th International Symposium on Temporal Representation and Reasoning 16-18 October 2017, Mons, Belgium http://informatique.umons.ac.be/time2017
EuroDocInfo 2009 22-23 January 2009, Mons, Belgium http://eurodocinfo09.umh.ac.be
BDA 2009 25èmes journées de Bases de Données Avancées 20-23 October 2009, Namur, Belgium https://info.fundp.ac.be/bda2009