Category: 1.1 Research (General)
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How my Ph.D. students work with supporting students (Hint: not Scrum)
As mentioned in a previous blog post, my Ph.D. students are often experienced software developers who take on the role of a chief programmer in the development of the software system supporting their research. In this work, at any point in time, each of my Ph.D. students is typically supported by 2-7 Bachelor and Master…
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Chief programmer teams alive and well in academia
According to Wikipedia, “a chief programmer team is a programming team organized in a star around a “chief” role, granted to the software engineer who understands the system’s intentions the best. Other team members get supporting roles.” Amusingly, this set-up is alive and well in academia, and for good reason. At least my research group…
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What’s better: Submit to ICSE or TSE? (Conference or journal?)
When planning a publication strategy for a dissertation, invariably the question comes up where to submit your papers. Ph.D. students naturally are biased towards conferences, because if a paper gets accepted to a conference they get to travel to a (usually) nice place. I nip this bias in the bud right away: For a journal…
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MECE translated: Überlappungsfrei und erschöpfend
When teaching about modeling the world, I often talk about how concepts should be MECE, that is, mutually exclusive and completely exhaustive. I didn’t invent this acronym, I took it from Barbara Minto’s writings about structured reasoning. I finally figured out the appropriate German translation, and, oh wonder, it is shorter than the English version.…
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On the importance of an open standard exchange format for QDA projects
I just returned from the Berliner Methodentreffen. One of the initiatives that was most interesting to me is a new attempt at agreeing on and standardizing an open exchange format for qualitative data analysis projects between the different QDA tools. As of today, it is not possible to take your data from one vendor’s tool…
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Why you should ask for money when working with industry
In our research, we often work with industry. In software engineering research, this is a no-brainer: Industry is, where there the research data is. That’s why we go there. For many research questions, we cannot create adequately, in a laboratory setting, a situation that lets us do our research. Once a researcher realizes this, they…