Weiyi (Ian) Shang

Dr. Weiyi Shang is a world-class expert in quality assurance of ultra-large-scale systems (ULSS), which are large cloud-based systems of Amazon- or Google-scale used by millions of people. In particular, he focuses on scalable performance testing of ULSS, and on effective engineering practices of run-time logs (to understand the ULSS’ run-time behavior).

Apart from Weiyi’s sheer volume and quality of publications on these topics (80 peer-reviewed publications, including 44 top-tier ones), what stands out is his focus on the software engineering aspects of performance testing and log engineering of ULSS. He aims at bringing the benefits of performance testing into the hands of every organization, at reduced cost. Similarly, he identifies and evaluates the impact of log engineering practices, enabling developers to put the right log-generating statements in the right place in the code.

Due to the relevance of this work to practitioners, Weiyi’s research results have been validated and deployed at major companies, including Blackberry, Ericsson, Alibaba and ERA Environmental. At the same time, two of his papers obtained ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper awards at the flagship International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), which illustrates the academic quality of his research.