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 software systems.
- f1tenth model race car navigation system
- Exploring Variability Management in Volkswagen Infotainment Systems
- Data Analytics at Volkswagen Infotainment
- Analyzing Infotainment Testing Strategies at Volkswagen
- Identification and Analysis of Security Features
- A Case Study of Automatically Generating Language Servers from Model-Driven Language Specifications
- mining software repositories, software analytics (e.g., codebase analyses)
- Novel Variation Management Systems
- thesis together with ABB Research Germany
- thesis on visualizing the evolution of software features, extending our feature dashboards and IDE plugins
- A SAT solver for Linux
- A Language Server (LSP) for code annotations
- Machine-/Deep-Learning-based GitHub Project Classification
- Configuration Mechanisms in Robotics Middlewares (e.g., ROS)
- Study on How Configuration Affects Security
- quantitative analysis of Linux kernel compiler errors
- Scala Code Generator from Meta-Models in EMF Ecore
- Intellij IDEA feature annotation/visualization plugin
- Software Defect Prediction
- Behavior Trees in Robotics
- improve test-case generation using object tracking in evosuite or randoop
- Robotics Reconfiguration Framework upon ROS (robotics operating system)
Currently Unavailable Topics
- a study on benchmarking in software engineering
- automatically classify IFDEF-related patches
- study response rates in empirical works
- test-case reuse techniques
- benchmark generator for evolving variant-rich systems