Biographie

Fabio Petrillo is an Associate Professor in the Department of Software Engineering and Information Technology at École de technologie supérieure (ÉTS), Montréal, Canada. He holds a Ph.D. and an M.Sc. from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS), Brazil, where he also earned his undergraduate degree in engineering. Before joining ÉTS in 2022, he was an Associate Professor at the Université du Québec à Chicoutimi (UQAC) and a postdoctoral researcher at Concordia University in Montréal. His postdoctoral experience also included research collaboration with the video game industry.

His research lies at the intersection of empirical software engineering, software architecture and quality, debugging and observability, cloud-native systems, Agile methods, and software engineering for video games. A significant part of his research program investigates how software engineering methods, architectures, testing techniques, and debugging approaches can address the distinctive challenges of game development. His work in this area spans more than fifteen years, from early empirical studies of problems and Agile practices in game development to recent research on game-engine architecture, automated game testing, bug reproduction, and debugging.

Petrillo is the creator of Swarm Debugging, a collaborative debugging approach that captures, shares, and visualizes developers’ debugging interactions to transform individual debugging sessions into reusable collective knowledge. The approach was developed through a series of empirical studies and culminated in the article Swarm Debugging: The Collective Intelligence on Interactive Debugging, published in the Journal of Systems and Software. His research has appeared in major software engineering journals and conferences, including IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, Empirical Software Engineering, Journal of Systems and Software, Information and Software Technology, IEEE Software, ICSME, ICPC, QRS, VISSOFT, ICSOC, MSR, and ICSE workshops. His publications cover topics ranging from software configuration and program comprehension to cloud architectures, software visualization, game engines, testing, and debugging. His recent work continues to address software architecture, software observability, and software engineering for games.

Petrillo is also active in the international software engineering research community. He served on the Steering Committee of the IEEE Working Conference on Software Visualization (VISSOFT) from 2020 to 2025, was Proceedings Co-Chair of ICSME 2024, and has repeatedly served on program committees for conferences such as ICPC, ICSE, FSE, and other software engineering venues. He is also involved in the organization of the Foundations of Applied Software Engineering for Games (FaSE4Games) workshop, contributing to the development of a research community focused on rigorous software engineering approaches for game development.

Before and alongside his academic career, Petrillo accumulated more than twenty years of industry experience as a software developer, software architect, manager, and Agile coach. His professional work included the design and implementation of mission-critical software systems as well as the mentoring and training of software engineering teams. This combination of industrial and academic experience informs his research agenda, which emphasizes empirically grounded approaches to solving practical software engineering problems.