Thesis Topics

If you want to work on a topic in the area of highly configurable systems (e.g., Linux kernel), robotics applications (e.g., ROS-based systems), software ecosystems (e.g., Android app analysis), or software product lines (e.g., commercial firmware for power electronics), please contact us via email. Most of the following topics can be adjusted for being addressed in Bachelor, Master, or PhD thesis, using different kinds of research methods (e.g., empirical methods including mining software repositories, engineering and evaluating a tool, or developing an analysis infrastructure), with or without industry participation.

Process

If you are interested in a thesis, please contact us via our mailing list. Use the subject “Interested in a [BSc/MSc] thesis topic” and in the email body (in English) briefly introduce yourself: study program, semester, university. To understand your background, we need a CV. It should contain your academic (computer-science-related) interests, academic experience (usually your studies), degrees, and computer-science-related projects that you already performed. It is also advisable to add your transcripts; otherwise, we might request them to understand what courses you have taken and where your strengths are. Do not worry about performance; it is more important to understand your background in order to choose a topic that relates to your strengths. Please also indicate whether there’s a specific topic or area you are interested in; otherwise, we will propose something. Sometimes, there are individual emails to members or the head of the chair — we cannot guarantee a response this way.

We will then invite you to our weekly research colloquium, where we can discuss topics in more detail. Often, it takes a few iterations to agree on a concrete topic that is of interest to you and that meets our research expertise and interests. After agreeing on a topic via a short proposal, you can start the registration process with the examination office (please refer to their guidelines for theses, GER / ENG). Please use our Latex or Word template for the proposal.

During the whole process of writing the proposal and the actual thesis, regular participation in the Chair’s research colloquium is required (see the page research colloquium for dates and further details).

You are expected to give a kick-off talk in the colloquium of 10 min max (strict) where you present your thesis proposal. Please schedule one as soon as your proposal was accepted. Shortly before or after handing in the thesis, you need to defend your thesis in a talk of max. 15 min.

Available Topics

We are also open to topic proposals, and we welcome thesis collaborations with companies. However, the topic must be aligned with our research interests then, and it must be a clear software-engineering research topic. Specifically, as opposed to engineering software to address a problem in another area, we need to improve methods and tools to engineer complex, variant-rich, and intelligent (AI-based) software systems. We often get requests for industrial projects that are about building some software. Usually, the proposals do not contain any research question, and if they do, then the questions are usually not related to improving software engineering in some form, but about addressing other problems where software is the solution. However, out is our objective to improve the theory (and practice) of software engineering.

Currently Unavailable Topics

Material on Thesis Writing