Juan Carlos Alonso Valenzuela

Juan Carlos Alonso Valenzuela

PhD in Computer Science and Researcher on AI-Driven Software Engineering

University of Seville

I am a software engineer and researcher with a strong academic background and a passion for building practical tools that solve real-world problems. I completed my PhD in Computer Science, specializing in automated testing of REST APIs. My work combines large-scale empirical experimentation, rigorous software engineering, and AI-based solutions, resulting in award-winning publications and tools that uncovered over 40 real bugs in widely used platforms like GitHub, YouTube, and DHL, leading to bug fixes and documentation updates.

My work is deeply tool-oriented, combining insights from software testing, machine learning, NLP, and generative AI to create automated solutions. I have published research on the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) for generating test oracles and I am actively interested in how LLMs can be integrated with existing developer tools to enhance their intelligence and productivity.

I am now seeking opportunities in industry where I can apply my expertise in software testing, LLMs, and NLP to design intelligent, reliable, and scalable systems. I am passionate about continuous learning, exploring new technologies, and building impactful tools at the intersection of AI and software engineering.

Download my CV (one page).

Download my CV (academic).

Research profiles:

Interests
  • Software Engineering
  • Software Testing
  • Natural Language Processing
  • Large Language Models
  • Deep Learning
Education

  • PhD in Computer Science: Automated Test Data and Test Oracle Generation for REST APIs, 2025

    University of Seville

  • Master's degree in Software Engineering - Cloud, data and IT management (Best record of my year), 2022

    University of Seville

  • Bachelor degree in Software Engineering, 2021

    University of Seville

  • English, bilingual proficiency

    C2 level certified by Cambridge

  • Japanese, intermediate working proficiency

    B1 level certified by the Institute of Languages of the University of Seville.

Experience

 
 
 
 
 
University of Seville
PhD in Computer Science
University of Seville
Sep 2022 – Jul 2025 Seville, Spain
Graduated with honors (cum laude).
 
 
 
 
 
Università della Svizzera italiana (USI)
Visiting PhD Student at Università della Svizzera Italiana
Università della Svizzera italiana (USI)
May 2024 – Apr 2024 Lugano, Switzerland
Collaborated with Professor Gabriele Bavota, head of the Software Analytics Research Team (SEART), as part of a PhD research stay. The collaboration focused on designing and implementing an approach that leverages Large Language Models to automatically detect failures in REST APIs by analyzing their documentation.
 
 
 
 
 
University of Washington (UW)
Visiting PhD Student at the University of Washington
University of Washington (UW)
Jul 2023 – Sep 2023 Seattle, United States
Collaborated with Professor Michael D. Ernst, head of the Programming Languages and Software Engineering (PLSE) group and former Microsoft Research scientist, as part of a PhD research visit. The work focused on enhancing AGORA, a technique proposed as part of the PhD for automatically generating test oracles for REST APIs through invariant detection.
 
 
 
 
 
University of Seville
Teaching Assistant
University of Seville
Oct 2021 – Jan 2023 Seville, Spain
Taught a total of 600 hours over three academic years (24 ECTS credits per year), combining teaching duties with postgraduate studies. Courses and sessions covered a wide range of technical topics, including Docker, Linux commands, web scraping, web development with Django and Spring Boot, software testing, software architecture, and systems integration. In addition to lecturing and supervising student projects, I contributed to the development of laboratory materials and designed the practical software integration project for the Architecture and Integration of Software Systems course within the Software Engineering degree program.
 
 
 
 
 
University of Seville
Master’s Degree in Software Engineering - Cloud, data and IT management
University of Seville
Oct 2021 – Jul 2022 Seville, Spain
Average: 9.59 (over 10). Subjects with distinction: 5 (including thesis), best record of my year award.
 
 
 
 
 
ISA Group
IT Technician
ISA Group
Nov 2020 – Oct 2021 Seville, Spain
Part-time position focused on the application of semantic web technologies and classical natural language processing techniques to automate the generation of test input values for REST APIs. This work led to the publication of a peer-reviewed article in IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering.
 
 
 
 
 
University of Mannheim
Erasmus Scholarship
University of Mannheim
Sep 2019 – Jun 2020 Mannheim, Germany
I completed the fourth year of my bachelor’s degree at the University of Mannheim, Germany, where I attended a master’s program in Data Science.
 
 
 
 
 
University of Seville
Bachelor Degree in Software Engineering
University of Seville
Sep 2016 – Jun 2019 Seville, Spain

Accomplish­ments

ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Artifact Award in ISSTA 2023
University of Washington, Seattle Jul 2023
Second Place Winner in ACM SRC Grand Finals 2023
ACM SRC Grand Finals May 2023
Winner of the ACM Student Research Competition at ESEC/FSE'22 (Graduate Category)
ESEC/FSE'22, National University of Singapore Nov 2022
Award for best Master’s Thesis of my promotion
University of Seville Jul 2022
Award for best Bachelor Thesis of my promotion
University of Seville Nov 2021
University of Mannheim

Projects

OKAMI
The OKAMI (Oracle Knowledge of API Methods for Innovation) dataset provides the manually annotated ground truth of 10,645 unary test oracles from 1,816 response fields across 17 operations of 12 industrial REST APIs; OKAMI was created to serve as a reliable benchmark for evaluating techniques for automated test oracle generation.
PostmanAssertify
PostmanAssertify is a tool for the automated generation of test assertions for REST API testing. PostmanAssertify takes as input the OpenAPI Specification (OAS) of the API under test and a CSV containing the set of confirmed invariants generated by AGORA+ and returns a Postman collection that includes a sample API request for each status code of the API operations under test and (attached to each request) all the invariants as executable assertions.
Beet
Beet is a Daikon front-end (also known as instrumenter) that converts any OpenAPI specification and a collection of API requests (and responses) into a format processable by the Daikon invariant detector; Beet is one of the core components of AGORA+, an approach for the Automated Generation of test Oracles for REST APIs through the detection of invariants (properties of the output that should always hold).

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