Prof. Henning Femmer from Qualicen will give a talk in the elite program’s special lecture series. The title of the talk is “Assisted Requirements Engineering” and it will take place virtually as an online meeting at 4PM on December 9th 2021.

Abstract

Requirements engineering (RE) is widely considered one of the most difficult and risky activities in software and systems engineering. Since RE requires communication, and despite other ideas and experiments, tasks around textual content remain at the center of RE for most projects. With a daily evolving field of natural language processing (NLP), the question is: Which of these tasks will – independent from any technological and methodological advancements – stay in the hands of the requirements engineer and which tasks will be automated?

Based on analogies from programming and autonomous driving, I will try to extrapolate from existing projects and take a very speculative look into the crystal ball.

Carolin Brandt from TU Delft will give a talk in the elite program’s special lecture series. The title of the talk is “Software Engineering Forschung an der TU Delft: Automatische Testgenerierung für Entwickler und vieles mehr” and it will take place virtually as an online meeting at 4PM on November 25th 2021.

Abstract

Carolin Brandt ist SE-Alumna des 12. Jahrgangs und ging für ihre Masterarbeit und später für ihre Doktorarbeit in die Niederlande, zur Software Engineering Research Group (SERG) der TU Delft. In der Ringvorlesung am 25. November präsentiert sie die breit gefächerten Forschungsfelder ihrer Gruppe, ihr eigenes Promotionsthema und persönlichen Erfahrungen zu Masterarbeit und Promotion in Delft.

Die SERG forscht in Bereichen wie Testen, Open-Source Entwicklung, DevOps, sowie SE für Fintech und KI. Methodisch liegt der Fokus auf empirischer Softwareforschung, Repository Mining, aber auch qualitativen Ansätzen und Design Science.

Als Teil des “TestShift” Forschungsprojektes beschäftigt sich Carolin mit der sozio-technologischen Seite des Testens, also den Entwicklern die (Unit) Tests schreiben. Ihr Ziel ist es automatisch Tests zu generieren die von Entwicklern akzeptiert und direkt in deren eigenen Code übernommen werden. Dafür baut sie Tools welche eine effektive Interaktion von Software Entwicklern mit automatischen Generierungstools ermöglichen und das Wissen der Entwickler in den Generierungsprozess einfließen lassen.

Carolin schrieb ihre Masterarbeit bei der SERG und beschloss, wenn auch zu einem anderen Thema, dort zu promovieren. Sie wird über Masterarbeiten und Promotionen an der TU Delft sprechen und Möglichkeiten für SE Studenten der aktuellen und kommenden Jahre nach Delft zu kommen.

Jochen Joswig from MaibornWolff will give a talk in the elite program’s special lecture series. The title of the talk is “Green Software” and it will take place virtually as an online meeting at 4PM on January 20th 2022.

Abstract

Information and communication technology is both a curse and a blessing when looking for solutions to environmental problems like the climate crisis. On the one hand, things like video calls and instant messaging reduce the need for travel and thereby reduce greenhouse gas emissions. On the other hand, the total energy consumption and natural resource demand of ICT is growing. Therefore, it is in my opinion the responsibility of everyone involved in software development to use these resources as sparingly and efficiently as possible. Ideally during all parts of a software’s lifecycle.

There has been extensive research in recent years about Green Software. In my talk, I will introduce some of the key ideas and methods from this research and make the matter of Green Software more accessible. Furthermore, I will introduce some areas in which in my opinion research is still lacking and provide a personal view on how this could be changed.

Biography

Jochen Joswig studied Computer Science at the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena (B.Sc.) and Universität Hamburg (M.Sc.). Since then, he has been especially interested in developing ESG and CSR software. He sees great potential in the cloud, when it comes to creating software solutions that are satisfying to use and at the same time eco-friendly, which is why he joined MaibornWolff in 2020 as a software engineer.

Dr. Axel Habermaier, graduate of the SE Master Program, will give a talk in the elite program’s special lecture series. The title of the talk is “Geht’s auch ein bisschen weniger komplex?” and it will take place virtually as an online meeting at 4PM on November 18th 2021.

Abstract

Komplexität begegnet uns jeden Tag in der Softwareentwicklungs-Branche. Ein Teil davon ist probleminhärent und muss durch die Softwarelösung abgebildet werden. Oft sind aber auch erhebliche Teile der Komplexität bedingt durch die Lösung an sich, was es nicht nur aus Gründen der Entwicklungseffizienz zu vermeiden gilt. Unklarer Code, unpassende Architekturentscheidungen oder Limitierungen in den zugrundeliegenden Technologien können Ursachen überbordender Komplexität sein. Der Vortrag zeigt auf, was mit Komplexität eigentlich gemeint ist, wie man sie erkennt und gibt ein paar Tipps zur Vermeidung unnötiger Komplexität.

Jonathan Streit from itestra will give a talk in the elite program’s special lecture series. The title of the talk is “Agile Entwicklung – Herausforderungen und Irrwege” and it will take place virtually as an online meeting at 4PM on November 4th 2021.

Abstract

Agile Methoden wie SCRUM sind inzwischen Standard in der Softwareentwicklung bei vielen Unternehmen. Mit der breiten Anwendung kommt es allerdings auch zu Missinterpretationen: Anstelle der ursprünglichen Fokussierung auf die Produktion nutzbringender lauffähiger Software durch flexible Teams dominieren dann starre Prozesse, Overhead durch kleinteilige Sprintplanung und Ziellosigkeit. Jonathan Streit, seit 15 Jahren Entwickler, Projektleiter und Berater bei der itestra GmbH, zeigt in seinem Vortrag mit Praxisbeispielen aus verschiedenen Unternehmen welche agilen Elemente wann Sinn machen, welche Alternativen es gibt und worauf man achten sollte.

Dr. Johannes Leupolz will give a talk in the elite program’s special lecture series. The title of the talk is “Qualitative and quantitative analysis of safety-critical systems with S#” and it will take place virtually as an online meeting at 10AM on July 1st 2021.

Abstract

Safety-critical systems are expected to operate safely under regular circumstances as well as in many degraded situations. In the latter case, these systems have to cope with one or more components that are not working as specified, while at the same time they have to avoid (serious) economical or environmental damage, injuries, or even loss of lives. S# provides a modeling language specifically designed to express important safety-related concepts such as faults and the physical environment of a safety-critical system. For safety assessments, model simulations as well as formal safety analyses are supported.

Iraklis Psaroudakis from Oracle Labs in Zurich will give a talk in the elite program’s special lecture series. The title of the talk is “Introduction to Graph Processing and Analytics (with PGX)” and it will take place virtually as an online meeting at 4:00PM on July 15th 2021.

Abstract

Graph analytics are one of the top data analytics trends. We begin by explaining why organizations are so keen on modeling data as a graph to express entities and their relationships as first-class citizens. Graphs allow to more easily gain complex insights from data (e.g., retail, healthcare or financial data) through a mix of expressive and powerful graph processing approaches: graph algorithms, querying, and machine learning. We drill down on each one of these three approaches, the differences between graph analytics/algorithms (such as Pagerank [1]) and graph queries (such as (:person)-[:friend]→(:person)), how they can be used, and the processing challenges they pose. We describe how Oracle Lab’s [2] in-memory graph processing framework, Parallel Graph Analytix (PGX) [3], tackles these processing challenges to develop a high-performance processing solution for large-scale graphs. Next, we continue to show how graphs can be created, modified, queried and visualized using Oracle Labs Data Studio’s interactive visual notebooks. Finally, we focus on a prominent real-world use case: we describe how Oracle’s Financial Crime and Compliance Studio (FCC Studio [4]) uses graph analytics & visualization to help a bank analyze its data and fight financial crime. We describe how this goal requires solving several technical & research challenges, and how we approach them. One of the major challenges is combining graph, entity resolution, machine learning, and big data techniques to correlate a bank’s internal customer data with external data (e.g., watchlists) into a financial graph, and help investigators detect patterns of criminal activity.

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank
2. https://labs.oracle.com
3. https://www.oracle.com/middleware/technologies/parallel-graph-analytix.html
4. https://www.oracle.com/industries/financial-services/analytics/crime-compliance-studio/

Speaker

Iraklis Psaroudakis is a Principal Member of Technical Staff at Oracle Labs (Switzerland). His research interests include analytical & graph workloads, parallel programming, OS/runtime-system interaction, machine learning, and financial crime & compliance. Prior to Oracle, he completed his Ph.D. at the Data-Intensive Application and Systems (DIAS) Laboratory of EPFL, Switzerland, focusing on scaling up highly concurrent analytical database workloads on multi-socket multi-core servers through (a) sharing data and work across concurrent queries, and (b) adaptive NUMA-aware data placement and task scheduling. During his Ph.D., he cooperated with the SAP HANA database team. Before starting his Ph.D., he completed his studies in Electrical & Computer Engineering at the National Technical University of Athens (NTUA), Greece.

Max Tschaikowski from Aalborg University will give a talk in the elite program’s special lecture series. The title of the talk is “Algorithmic reduction of quantitative models” and it will take place virtually as an online meeting at 4:30PM on July 8th 2021.

Abstract

Differential equations are ubiquitous in quantitative modeling and allow to model, for instance, power grids, epidemic forecasts or protein-interaction networks. Unfortunately, the simulation of many realistic models is computationally prohibitive due to their large size. An approach for the simplification of difficult problems is model reduction where the idea is to formally relate the original model to a smaller model which can be solved more efficiently.

In this talk, I will provide a high-level introduction to simulation-preserving reductions of differential equations. Specifically, we will show that polynomial differential equations can be encoded as graphs which, in turn, can be efficiently reduced by means of partition refinement algorithms in the style of Paige and Tarjan. The reduction of arbitrary differential equations, instead, will be reduced to SAT. The talk will finish with applications to biological models.

Jan Peleska from the University in Bremen will give a talk in the elite program’s special lecture series. The title of the talk is “An Introduction to SysML” and it will take place virtually as an online meeting at 4PM on July 1st 2021.

Abstract

The System Modeling Language SysML is one of the most widely used wide-spectrum formalisms for model-based systems engineering (MBSE). It has been elaborated as a profile of the Unified Modeling Language UML, with emphasis on systems modelling. Just like UML, it has been standardised by the Object Management Group OMG. We briefly introduce the SysML 1.6 components for modelling

• Structure (Blocks, Ports, Connectors, Flows and associated Block Definition Diagrams and Internal Block Diagrams)
• Behaviour (State Machines, Activities, Interactions, Use Cases)

When compared to other (formal or semi-formal) modelling languages, SysML has some unique selling points:

• Requirements are “first-class citizens” of the SysML language: they are represented by specific language elements, and they can be associated with other model elements for the purpose of requirements tracing.
• Physical laws can be specified in re-usable model libraries by means of so-called constraint blocks.
• For a concrete system, the laws can be imported, and their formal parameters may be bound to concrete system parameters.
• The standardised XML-based internal representation of SysML models and its meta models (so-called XMI-format) allows for effective model-based code generation.

Despite these unique selling points, SysML has been criticised to be fairly complex to handle in practise. We explain the main reasons behind this criticism: the syntax may be regarded as too rich, and the static and behavioural semantics are quite complex, since they have to be traced back to UML via the profile mechanism. Moreover, graphical notation is not as well-supported by existing modelling tools as textual programming with today’s IDEs like Eclipse, MS Developer, or Xcode. This criticism has led to the (not yet fully standardised) definition of SysML v2, whose highlights will be briefly sketched to conclude the talk.

Since the size of the SysML is really enormous, we can sketch many aspects of this language only briefly in this overview talk. However, detailed references to the literature will be given.

Karola Klarl from BMW will give a talk in the elite program’s special lecture series. The title of the talk is “Agile@BMW – Uni-Theorie und Unternehmens-Wirklichkeit” and it will take place virtually as an online meeting at 4:30PM on June 10th 2021.

Abstract

Scrum, Kanban, Lean, SAFe, … – Agile Begriffe und Theorien gibt es viele, aber wie sieht das eigentlich in der Realität aus? Welche täglichen Herausforderungen treten auf, für die es keine Lehrbuch-Lösung gibt? Und was hat das ganze eigentlich mit dem SE-Studiengang zu tun?
Basierend auf meinen Erfahrungen als Agile Master bei BMW möchte ich euch meine Antworten auf diese Fragen geben.