Rate My Professor Andy Zaidman

Andy Zaidman is a full professor in software engineering at Delft University of Technology (TU Delft), The Netherlands, and Head of the Department of Software Technology within the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science since January 2024. He obtained his MSc in 2002 and PhD in 2006 from the University of Antwerp, Belgium, under the supervision of Prof. dr. Serge Demeyer. Zaidman began his academic career as a post-doctoral researcher at TU Delft in October 2006, working with Prof. dr. Arie van Deursen. He advanced to assistant and associate professor positions within the Software Engineering Research Group (SERG) at TU Delft, was appointed associate professor in June 2014, and full professor in software quality in July 2019. Previously, he served as a lecturer at the University of Leicester, UK, from 2008 to 2010, and part-time lecturer at the University of Antwerp during the 2007-2008 academic year. He has also held roles such as chair of the examination committee and program director of the BSc Computer Science and Engineering program at TU Delft.

Zaidman's research interests encompass software evolution, software testing, reverse engineering for program comprehension, impact of software changes on quality, code clone management, repository mining, performance optimization, multi-tenancy, web API stability, agile requirements engineering, and automated static analysis tools. His work has significantly influenced the field, evidenced by over 11,900 citations on Google Scholar and prestigious grants including the NWO VIDI grant (2013, €800,000 for TestRoots) and NWO VICI grant (2019, €1.5M for TestShift). Notable awards include the Best CS Teacher Award (2017) from TU Delft's EEMCS faculty, multiple Most Influential Paper Awards (e.g., SANER 2022 for "Evaluating the Lifespan of Code Smells using Software Repository Mining," ICST 2025), Distinguished Paper Award at ICPC 2025, and Distinguished Reviewer Awards for MSR 2024 and 2026. Key publications feature "A Systematic Survey of Program Comprehension through Dynamic Analysis" (IEEE TSE, 2009), "Developer Testing in The IDE: Patterns, Beliefs, And Behavior" (IEEE TSE, 2019), "Studying the co-evolution of production and test code" (EMSE, 2011), and recent papers like "An Inconvenient Truth in Software Engineering? The Environmental Impact of Testing Open Source Java Projects" (2024). Zaidman joined the editorial board of Empirical Software Engineering in 2019 and has delivered public lectures such as his TEDxDelft talk "Making Testing Fun" (2015) and inaugural lecture "Software Quality: A Blessing or a Curse?" (2022).