Congratulations to our PhDs Nicolas Hlad, Aless Hosry, Benoit Verhaeghe and Pascal Zaragoza from Berger-Levrault’s BL.Research team for their participation in the 2025 edition of the ESUG (European Smalltalk User Group) conference! This year’s conference took place from July 1-4 in Gdansk, Poland. The theme was innovation in Smalltalk technologies and their use in software engineering.
AI for comment generation, model generation and documentation
ESUG 2025 was an opportunity to share their work with the international community through scientific conferences and workshops focusing on advanced approaches to AI-assisted programming, Model Driven Engineering and Virtual Machine Smalltalk optimization.
- Conference 1 & Innovation Award entry: “GitProjectHealth: exploring Git repositories through modeling”
Work by Nicolas Hlad, Benoit Verhaeghe and Kilian Bauvent
GitProjectHealth on GitHub offers an extensible framework for analyzing projects hosted on Git platforms. Based on Pharo and Moose, this tool collects and visualizes metrics essential to the health of software projects. It was also selected for the “Data and Tool Showcase” session at the MSR 2025 (Mining Software Repositories) conference in Ottawa, Canada, at the end of April!
- Participation in the Innovation Award: “AutoReneraku: automating code review”
Work by Benoît Verhaeghe
AutoReneraku is an experimental automatic code analysis tool for Pharo, built on the basis of SmalltalkCI. It aims to facilitate the adoption of best practices through automated, reproducible code reviews.
- Workshop 1: FASTTypeScript metamodel generation using FAST traits and TreeSitter project
Work by Aless Hosry and Benoit Verhaeghe
Presentation of an original approach to generating TypeScript metamodels from syntactic grammars, in a reverse engineering logic.
- Workshop 2: Migrating Katalon Studio Tests to Playwright with Model Driven Engineering
Work by Nicolas Hlad and Benoit Verhaeghe
Presentation of an applied study of automated test migration using model-driven engineering.
- Workshop 3: Directing generative AI for Pharo Documentation
Work by Pascal Zaragoza and Nicolas Hlad
Prospective reflection on how to direct generative AI to produce quality documentation adapted to Pharo projects.
A strong presence at the service of open innovation
And this commitment was highly rewarded this year, with Nicolas Hlad and Aless Hosry winning 2 awards! Nicolas Hlad and Aless Hosry each won a Best Paper Award. Nicolas Hlad took third place for his work, while Aless Hosry took second place for her paper presented at the workshop. These distinctions underline the excellence and innovation of their research in the field of software engineering.
The active participation of our research engineers in ESUG 2025 illustrates Berger-Levrault’s commitment to open source ecosystems, collaborative research and the continuous improvement of development practices. These contributions enrich everyday tools, while paving the way for new methods of code analysis and transformation.
