A career built across four countries, on one continuing question: how do we make software engineering more sustainable, more trustworthy, and more human?
Dr. Basit Shahzad is an Associate Professor of Software Engineering at the University of Prince Mugrin, Saudi Arabia. He holds a Ph.D. in Software Engineering from Universiti Teknologi PETRONAS (UTP), Malaysia, and performed his postdoctoral research at the Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge, United Kingdom.
His academic path has taken him through Pakistan, Malaysia, the UK, and Saudi Arabia. His research agenda centers on agentic software engineering, emperical software engineering, AI and society, and software for social good, with a consistent underlying commitment to humanized computing using technology in service of people.
Core Research Areas:
Agentic Software EngineeringSmart CitiesAI and Labour DynamicsEmperical Software Engineering Computing for Social GoodSocial ComputingGreen Computing
Working on "The Carbon Clause" on carbon efficiency and on GenAI's impact on software engineering labor, targeting the ICSE Software Engineering in Society (SEIS) track. ICSE 27, Ireland
2026
Teaching SE 475 (Agentic Software Engineering) for the first time, with a full set of weekly lecture materials built from the ground up. The resource material shall soon be available.
Teaching
Courses currently taught, plus a new course in development, in the undergraduate Software Engineering program at UPM:
SE 475
Agentic Software Engineering
Agent architectures, MCP, LangGraph, CrewAI, and AutoGen; prompt- and spec-driven engineering; and the ethics of building autonomous software agents.
Currently Teaching
SE 311
Software Requirements Engineering
Elicitation, specification, and validation of requirements, revised to integrate AI-assisted tools such as Otter.ai, IBM DOORS Next, and GitHub Copilot.
Currently Teaching
Research Impact & Statistics
Google Scholar
2,957+
Citations
4
Countries Worked In
10
Countries Visited
2
Workshops Founded
Teaching & Mentorship
Dr. Shahzad teaches at the Software Engineering department at the University of Prince Mugrin, with a focus on requirements engineering and, more recently, agentic software engineering practice.
SE 475 — Agentic Software Engineering
Covers agent architectures, the Model Context Protocol (MCP), and frameworks including LangGraph, CrewAI, and AutoGen, alongside prompt- and spec-driven engineering methods and the ethical questions raised by autonomous software agents. Taught using Modern Software Engineering with AI Essentials as the core reference.
SE 311 — Software Requirements Engineering
A revised specification (V3) integrating named AI tools throughout the requirements process, including Otter.ai for interview capture, Dovetail for synthesis, IBM DOORS Next and Requiment for specification management, and GitHub Copilot for downstream implementation traceability.
Books & Applications
A published textbook, plus a set of small, deployable AI tools built as working demonstrations of agentic software design.
Book
Modern Software Engineering with AI Essentials — First Edition, ISBN 979-8241532466, December 2025. Used as the core reference text across Dr. Shahzad's courses, including SE 475 and SE 311.
AI Agent Projects (Prototypes)
Built directly on the Anthropic API as single-file, deployable web applications:
Agent
Brief
A document summarization agent that condenses long documents into clear, structured briefs.
Two-Agent System
Requirements Elicitation Process Automation
A live AI stakeholder persona — Dr. Aisha Al-Harthi, Chief Librarian at UPM — used to teach requirements elicitation through simulated interviews.
Widget
Song Generator
A lightweight generative-AI widget exploring creative applications of agentic tooling.
Research & Supervision
Research centers on Emperical software engineeering, Agentic software engineering, software and society, and how generative AI is reshaping the SE discipline — connected throughout by a commitment to humanized computing.
Agentic Software EngineeringGreen & Sustainable ComputingEmperical Software EngineeringSoftware for Social GoodRequirements EngineeringSoftware-AI & Society
Graduate Supervision
Actively supervising graduate and undergraduate research in the areas above. Prospective students are welcome to reach out at b.shahzad@upm.edu.sa.
Conferences & Workshops
International workshop founded and organized, to be held in 2027.
Permanent General Chair
GreenArch 2027
Co-located with ICSA 2027, Sydney, Australia.
An international workshop on sustainable software architecture colocated with ICSA, where i serve as permanent General Chair.