Research

Goal

Software is everywhere and impacts everybody. The Chair conducts research to understand, assess and improve 

1. software engineering activities (and related methods, processes, techniques, etc.) for designing, implementing, testing and maintaining software, and
2. outcomes of software engineering activities (documentation, specifications, code, systems, etc.).

We do this based on systematic approaches and empirically grounded data.

The Chair's work supports effective and efficient software engineering by:

• Providing reliable and actionable insights about processes and techniques to build and maintain software
• Providing reliable and actionable insights about properties of software (e.g., software quality, performance)
• Guiding "empirically vetted interventions" (methods, techniques, etc.) for software engineering and developers

Philosophy

We develop methods and techniques to improve the design, implementation and maintenance of software systems

• based on sound theoretical and empirical foundations (rigor),
• with software engineering practitioners (relevance), and
• possibly informing the training of software engineers (impact).

We acknowledge that software-based technology is human-centric: software is built for humans, by humans. Therefore, the Chair's research is multi-disciplinary:

• Computer Science
• Economics
• Psychology
• Evidence-based Software Engineering