Mark Roberts
Research Software Engineer at University of Washington, Programming Languages and Software Engineering Group
Bellevue, Washington, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolMark Roberts is a Research Software Engineer based in Bellevue, Washington with 13 years of focused experience in software testing, automation, and research-oriented tooling. He has long-standing ties to the University of Washington’s Programming Languages and Software Engineering Group, where he builds and maintains robust experimental infrastructures that support reproducible software-engineering research. His open-source contributions include significant QA and test-automation work on well-regarded projects such as Defects4J and Randoop, improving test generation, coverage analysis, and flaky-test handling. Earlier in his career he held senior engineering leadership roles at Microsoft and developed compilers and tooling as a consultant, giving him deep systems and tooling expertise across industry and academia. With an academic foundation in mathematics (BS, UW) and computer science (MS, UCLA), he blends rigorous analytical thinking with practical improvements to developer and research workflows. Colleagues rely on him for quietly resolving nondeterminism and edge-case failures that often block large-scale experiments.
13 years of coding experience
25 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Mathematics, Bachelor of Science (B.S.), Mathematics at University of WashingtonUniversity of California, Los Angeles
Github Skills (8)
code-coverage10
javas10
junit10
perl10
java10
test-automation10
testing10
bash9
Programming languages (6)
Github contributions (5)
randoop/randoop
Nov 2017 - Jan 2023
Automatic test generation for Java
Role in this project:
QA Engineer / Test Automation Engineer
QA Engineer / Test Automation EngineerContributions:6 releases, 34 reviews, 86 commits in 5 years 3 months
Contributions summary:Mark primarily focused on improving the robustness and reliability of the Randoop testing framework. Their contributions involved fixing parsing errors within the test generation process, correcting special character escaping issues, and addressing problems related to handling empty argument lists. They implemented improvements to temporary file deletion and addressed nondeterminism issues. The user also contributed to documentation updates, specifically related to test coverage and handling of flaky tests, enhancing the usability of the testing framework.
javatest-automationtest-automation-javatestingtesting-tools
rjust/defects4j
Feb 2018 - Jan 2022
A Database of Real Faults and an Experimental Infrastructure to Enable Controlled Experiments in Software Engineering Research
Role in this project:QA Engineer / Test Automation Engineer
QA Engineer / Test Automation EngineerContributions:8 reviews, 8 commits, 46 PRs in 4 years
Contributions summary:Mark primarily focused on enhancing and maintaining the testing infrastructure for the Defects4J project, specifically related to Randoop test generation and coverage analysis. They added features to existing scripts, such as `show-coverage.pl` and `randoop_coverage.sh`, and incorporated options to handle failing tests more effectively. The changes demonstrate a deep understanding of the testing process and the tools utilized to assess code coverage within the Defects4J framework. They also introduced new tools for KLOC analysis of the test suites.
databasedefects4jjavaperl
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.