Souhaila Serbout is a senior researcher at the ZEST Research Group at the Department of Informatics (IfI) of the University of Zurich. She obtained her PhD from the Software Institute at USI in Lugano, Switzerland, under the guidance of Prof. Dr. Cesare Pautasso. Her PhD research focused on visualizing and analyzing the structures and data models of Web APIs to identify disparities between developers' expectations and real-world API designs, conducted in the context of the API-ACE project.
Research Interests
Publications
[C17] - Diana Carolina M. Hurtado, Serbout Souhaila and Cesare Pautasso. "Mining Security Documentation Practices in OpenAPI Descriptions." 2025 IEEE 22nd International Conference on Software Architecture Companion (ICSA). IEEE, 2025. PDF
[J4] - Patric Genfer, Souhaila Serbout, Georg Simhandl, Uwe Zdun and Cesare Pautasso. "Understanding Security Tactics in Microservice APIs using Annotated Software Architecture Decomposition Models – A Controlled Experiment". Empirical Software Engineering Journal BIB PDF
[C16] - Serbout Souhaila, Cesare Pautasso, "OAS2Tree: Visual API-First Design", 18th European Conference on Software Architecture (ECSA), September 2024, Luxembourg, Luxembourg. PDF Read More
[C15] - Petr Pícha, Serbout Souhaila, "On the Adoption of Open Source Software Licensing – A Pattern Language", 28th European Conference on Pattern Languages of Programs (EuroPLoP 2024), Kloster Irsee, Germany, ACM, July, 2024. PDF to appear
[C14] - Serbout Souhaila, Cesare Pautasso, "How Many Web APIs Evolve Following Semantic Versioning?",24th International Conference on Web Engineering (ICWE 2024), June 2024, Tampere, Finland. PDF
[C13] - Serbout Souhaila, Cesare Pautasso, "APIstic: A Large Collection of OpenAPI Metrics", 21st International Conference on Mining Software Repositories (MSR 2024), April 2024, Lisbon, Portugal. PDF Slides Dataset Read More
[J3] - Souhaila Serbout, and Cesare Pautasso. "How Are Web APIs Versioned in Practice? A Large-Scale Empirical Study" Journal of Web Engineering Pre-print
[C12] - Serbout Souhaila, Diana Carolina M. Hurtado, and Cesare Pautasso, "Interactively exploring API changes and versioning consistency", 11th IEEE Working Conference on Software Visualization (VISSOFT 2023), Bogota, Colombia, IEEE, October, 2023. Online Gallery PDF Best Paper Award
[C11] - Serbout Souhaila, Amine El Malki, Cesare Pautasso, and Uwe Zdun, "API Rate Limit - A Pattern Collection", 28th European Conference on Pattern Languages of Programs (EuroPLoP 2023), Kloster Irsee, Germany, ACM, July, 2023. PDF
[C10] - Serbout Souhaila, and Cesare Pautasso. "An empirical study of Web API versioning practices" International Conference on Web Engineering. Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland, 2023. BIB PDF Best Paper Award
[C9] - Serbout Souhaila, Cesare Pautasso, and Uwe Zdun. "How Composable is the Web? An Empirical Study on OpenAPI Data model Compatibility." 2022 IEEE International Conference on Web Services (ICWS). IEEE, 2022. BIB PDF
[J2] - Di Lauro Fabio, Souhaila Serbout, and Cesare Pautasso. "A large-scale empirical assessment of web API size evolution." Journal of web engineering 21.6 (2022): 1937-1979. BIB PDF
[J1] - Ivanchikj Ana, Souhaila Serbout, and Cesare Pautasso. "Live process modeling with the BPMN Sketch Miner." Software and Systems Modeling 21.5 (2022): 1877-1906. BIB PDF
[C8] - Serbout Souhaila, Alessandro Romanelli, and Cesare Pautasso. "ExpressO: From Express. js Implementation Code to OpenAPI Interface Descriptions." European Conference on Software Architecture. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2022. BIB PDF Best Tools & Demos Paper Award
[C7] - Di Lauro Fabio, Souhaila Serbout, and Cesare Pautasso. "To Deprecate or to Simply Drop Operations? An Empirical Study on the Evolution of a Large OpenAPI Collection." European Conference on Software Architecture. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2022. BIB PDF
[C6] - Serbout Souhaila, Fabio Di Lauro, and Cesare Pautasso. "Web apis structures and data models analysis." 2022 IEEE 19th International Conference on Software Architecture Companion (ICSA-C). IEEE, 2022. BIB PDF
[C5] - Serbout Souhaila, Pautasso Cesare, Uwe Zdun, Olaf Zimmerman. "From OpenAPI fragments to api pattern primitives and design smells." 26th European Conference on Pattern Languages of Programs. 2021. BIB PDF
[C4] - Di Lauro Fabio, Souhaila Serbout, and Cesare Pautasso. "Towards large-scale empirical assessment of Web APIs evolution." International Conference on Web Engineering. Cham: Springer International Publishing, 2021. BIB PDF Best Paper Award
[C3] - Ivanchikj Ana, Souhaila Serbout, and Cesare Pautasso. "From text to visual BPMN process models: Design and evaluation." Proceedings of the 23rd ACM/IEEE international conference on model-driven engineering languages and systems. 2020. BIB PDF
[C2] - Thibaud Masson, Romain Ravet, Francisco Javier Bermudez Ruiz, Souhaila Serbout, Diego Sevilla Ruiz, Anthony Cleve. "Defining Referential Integrity Constraints in Graph-oriented Datastores." MODELSWARD. 2020. BIB PDF
[C1] - Serbout Souhaila, Francisco Javier Bermúdez Ruiz, and Begona Moros Valle. "UStoReqIF: Conectando requisitos ágiles con tradicionales."In: Pérez-Benedí, J. (ed.) Actas de las XXIV Jornadas de Ingeniería del Software y Bases de Datos (JISBD 2019). Sistedes (2019). https://hdl.handle.net/11705/JISBD/2019/039 BIB PDF
Posts
What about Web API versioning?
Insights from a large-scale empirical study on Web APIs versioning practices and patterns observed in real-world implementations.
Read more
Web API Change Visualizations
Interactively exploring API changes and their consistency with versioning in evolving APIs through interactive sunburst visualizations.
Read moreAPI Rate Limit Adoption
A comprehensive pattern collection exploring prevailing patterns for Rate Limit adoption and their real-world applications.
Read more
Understanding DataFrame Concatenation
Why You Should Avoid Using DataFrame Concatenation Inside Loops or Recursion? Performance insights and best practices.
Read morePosters
Research Prototypes & Tools
APIcture
A CLI tool to analyze histories of Web APIs, and generate visualizations and metrics starting from repositories containing OpenAPI spec or backends written in Express.js.
Available on GitHub: https://github.com/souhailaS/APIcture
NPM Package: https://www.npmjs.com/package/apict
OAS2Tree
A visualization tool that helps API developers keep an eye on the structure of their HTTP APIs through the API tree visualization of the API model written in OpenAPI Language. The tool also offers access to a large collection of thousands of API descriptions to visualize and edit them.
Web Version: http://api-ace.inf.usi.ch/openapi-to-tree
VS Code Extension: VS Code Marketplace
ExpressO
A tool that automatically generates OpenAPI descriptions from Express.js implementation code, bridging the gap between code and documentation.
GitHub: https://github.com/AlessandroRomanelli/ExpressO
NPM Package: https://www.npmjs.com/package/expresso-api
Quirx
A mutation-based fuzzer for evaluating prompt robustness in LLM-based applications. Quirx systematically tests prompt stability through controlled mutations to ensure consistent behavior across varied inputs, helping prevent production failures and improve LLM application reliability.
Project Website: https://souhailas.github.io/Quirx/
GitHub: https://github.com/souhailaS/quirx