HFSD Workshop
The Second International Workshop on Human Factors for Software Dependability
The second International Workshop on Human Factors for Software Dependability (HFSD), co-located with the 36th IEEE International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering (ISSRE 2025), which will be held in São Paulo, Brazil, from October 21 to 24, 2025.
Software is created by humans and is often used by humans, with the ultimate goal of benefiting humanity. Programming is a cognitive-intensive activity, with human factors playing a significant role in causing faults in programs and inappropriate usages that may lead to accidents. Studying how human factors affect the reliability, safety, and security of software systems is crucial for proactively and continuously improving the trustworthiness of these systems.
The recent trend of developing software with AI-assisted coding tools (e.g., Copilot, ChatGPT, Tabnine, among others) accelerates the development process but also introduces human factor-related risks and challenges that affect software reliability and security. Among these, developers’ cognitive overload, difficulty in comprehending AI-generated code, and decision fatigue resulting from intensive interaction with AI coding assistants are emerging as new threats to software quality, opening up new avenues for research.
HFSD is a specialized workshop aims to bring researchers from multiple disciplines together to address the human factors that challenge the reliability, safety, and security of software systems. Interested topics include, but are not limited to, the following:
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Humans as the Designers of Software Systems
- Human errors that cause software defects in various stages of the software development life cycle.
- Interdisciplinary experimental paradigms for studying the cognitive mechanisms behind software defects.
- Various psychological factors that influence software engineers’ tendencies to introduce software defects.
- Biometrics in software engineering to detect developers’ engagement, error-prone cognitive states, stress, fatigue, etc.
- Code comprehension assessment, identification of comprehension bottlenecks, and dynamic approaches to assess code understandability.
- Human factors in AI-assisted coding.
- Personality traits and emotions in software development, particularly their impact on software reliability.
- Human factors related to software reliability techniques, such as software diversity.
- Human factors as predictors of software reliability, etc.
- Other related topics.
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Humans as the Users of Software Systems
- User errors that affect the safety of software systems.
- Human factors that affect software security.
- User errors that impact the failures and reliability of software systems.
- Users as predictors of the reliability, safety, and security of software systems.
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Humans as Beneficiaries of Software Systems
- Social and ethical issues of AI software systems.
- Human safety of autonomous systems.