The German Software Engineering conference took place in 2023 in Paderborn. I was very honoured to be invited as keynote speaker to talk about continuing education. The talk and slides were in German

Die digitale Transformation aller Lebensbereiche und Industrien ist in vollem Gange und benötigt viele Fachkräfte. Die aktuellen Hochschulabsolvent*innen decken diesen Bedarf bei weitem nicht. Durch Umwälzungen in anderen Bereichen, wie beispielsweise der Elektrifizierung in der Mobilität, werden dagegen andere Kompetenzen nicht mehr gebraucht. Stattdessen sind Kompetenzen in Software und Künstlicher Intelligenz überall gefragt. Dafür werden maßgeschneiderte, flexible Programme zur Fortbildung im Software Engineering benötigt. Diese Keynote berichtet von zwei Beispielen, wie dies realisiert werden kann:

(1) Wir bieten eine modulare Grundausbildung Software Engineering für die Industrie an. Hier werden Mitarbeiter*innen von Unternehmen mit existierender Hochschulbildung auf den Einsatz in Softwareprojekten geschult. Dieses Programm umfasst Vorlesungen und Übungen an ein bis zwei Tagen über ein ganzes Jahr,  Abschlussklausuren und zwei Projektphasen. Hier haben bereits knapp 70 Teilnehmende aus der Industrie in vier Jahrgängen das Programm durchlaufen.

(2) Studierende und Promovierende können Microdegrees an der Schnittstelle von Künstlicher Intelligenz, Software Engineering und Anwendungen erwerben. Den Rahmen dazu bietet die Artificial Intelligence Software Academy (AISA) gefördert durch das MWK Baden-Württemberg, das Forschung und Lehre an dieser Schnittstelle verbindet. Es können flexible Microdegrees erworben werden, die diese Kombination von Software Engineering und Künstlicher Intelligenz enthalten und sich insbesondere auch an Nichtinformatiker*innen richten. Damit werden diese Kompetenzen Basisfähigkeiten für alle Fachbereiche, erhöhen die Einsatzmöglichkeiten der Teilnehmenden der Fortbildung und reduzieren den Fachkräfte-Mangel. Dies unterstreicht die praktische Relevanz des Software Engineerings in der Praxis und zeigt den wichtigen Beitrag, den Universitäten hier leisten können.

https://www.aisa.uni-stuttgart.de

Volkswagen kindly invited me to give a talk in their seminar series “Code Analysis and Beyond” on our research in test suite evaluation and optimisation. I report on glass-box methods to detect pseudo-tested code as well as code that is too trivial to test. Furthermore, I describe black-box techniques that use traces and data flow on the system integration level.

Here are the slides:

Here are the papers that report on these research contributions:

R. Niedermayr, T. R ̈ohm, and S. Wagner. Too trivial to test? an inverse view on defect prediction to identify methods with low fault risk. PeerJ Computer Science, 5:e187, 2019.

R. Niedermayr, E. Juergens, and S. Wagner. Will my tests tell me if i break this code? In 2016 IEEE/ACM International Workshop on Continuous Software Evolution and Delivery (CSED), pages 23–29. IEEE, 2016.

S. Vöst and S. Wagner. Trace-based test selection to support continuous integration in the automotive industry. In Proceedings of the International Workshop on Continuous Software Evolution and Delivery, pages 34–40, 2016.

D. Hellhake, T. Schmid, and S. Wagner. Using data flow-based coverage criteria for black-box integration testing of distributed software systems. In 2019 12th IEEE Conference on Software Testing, Validation and Verification (ICST), pages 420–429. IEEE, 2019.

I am happy to give an invited talk at the meeting of the subgroup Software of the ZVEI Zentralverband Elektrotechnik- und Elektronikindustrie e.V.

I’ll give a short introduction to STAMP/STPA and what we have done to support software verification and testing.

I have the pleasure to present our NaPiRE project on understanding the state of the practice and problems in requirements engineering at ICSE 2020.

Here are the slides:

Emad Shihab (Concordia University) and me are bringing together the international community working on using bots in software engineering for the first time.

Bots (short for software robots) are software applications that perform often repetitive or simple tasks. In particular, social and chat bots interacting with humans are a recent research topic. Similarly, bots can be used to automate many tasks that are performed by software practitioners and teams in their day-to-day work. Recent work argue that bots can save developers' time and significantly increase productivity. Therefore, the goal of this one-day workshop is to bring together software engineering researchers and practitioners to discuss the opportunities and challenges of bots in software engineering. We solicit 4 page, research, experience report and position papers. Research papers are expected to describe new research results and make contributions to the body knowledge in the area. Experience reports are expected to describe experiences with (amongst other things) the development, deployment, and maintenance of bot-based systems in the software engineering domain. Position papers are expected to discuss controversial issues in the field, or describe interesting or thought provoking ideas that are not yet fully developed. Papers will be reviewed by at least three program committee members. Accepted research and experience report papers will be invited to give a talk to present their findings. Authors of accepted position papers will be invited to give a short lightning talk. Papers may address issues along the general themes, including but not limited, to the following topics:

• Using bots to derive software requirements and documentation 

• Using bots in the context of the reliability and quality of software systems

• Using bots to support software system release and deployment

• Using bots to enhance and support testing & maintenance of software systems

• Supporting and answering developer questions using bots

• Using bots to ensure the safety, security, privacy and trustworthiness of software systems

• Effective processes for the development of bot-based software

• Privacy and ethics issues related to the use of bots in software systems

• Issues in the interaction of bots and developers and other stakeholders

• Experiences using bot frameworks in software systems

Submission information and more details can be found on the workshop page.

SINTEF organised an interesting industry workshop in Oslo on non-functional qualities such as security, scalability and safety play a role in agile projects. I was invited to talk about our work on using system-theoretic analysis (STAMP/STPA) for safety, security and privacy analysis. 

Here are my slides:

I was invited to give a talk in the Munich Software Architecture Meetup which, of course, I gladly accepted. You can find my German slides below. I reported on some newer findings in the areas of coupled change analysis and the improved usage of static analysis tools.

The premier software engineering conference goes to Buenos Aires in 2017. I'm honoured to serve again in the programme committee for the research track. Please consider to submit! The deadline is going to be later this year (probably September).

A topic we are very interested in has its own international workshop: agile development of safety-critical software. I attended the last edition in Edinburgh and I was delighted to be asked to give the keynote this year.

I gave some insights in our work with STAMP and STPA.

I have the pleasure to be chairing the doctoral symposium at the XP 2017 conference. Please find the call for research proposals below:

Agile software development is a mainstream approach in software engineering. Therefore, software engineering research is and should be involved in understanding and improving agile practices. We can now look back at an impressive amount of work on agile software development, empirical and methodological. Yet, there are still many open questions out there and agile software development has not stood still. Newer practices and approaches need to investigated scientifically. Yet, choosing the right research methods and strategies can be a difficult endeavour.

This doctoral symposium should be a help to PhD students who already or plan to conduct research in the wider area of agile software development. Experienced researchers from the board of advisors will review the research plans from PhD students and give them detailed feedback and guidance. The most promising research plans will be invited to be presented at the symposium where the students can get more direct feedback in the discussion. Furthermore, we will have an interactive session at the doctoral symposium with all present PhD students and advisors to work on their abilities to develop research plans.

Participation in the symposium is being solicited at three levels:

Participants are doctoral students, preferably at a mid-point in their dissertation work (i.e. are at least 12 months from defending their dissertation, but have at least a preliminary research design), who will present their work at the symposium and receive feedback from a dedicated mentor from the board of advisors, the other symposium advisors and other attendees.

Those wishing to be participants are asked to submit a paper (up to 6 pages following the LNBIP template) on their research plan including:

• Title and abstract 
• Introduction (motivation, rationale, background) to the research
• Description of issues or points on which the author would like to get the most advice on
• Relevant prior work (foundations, relevant research results, research gap this work tries to fill)
• Research objectives, questions and hypotheses (with rationale)
• Research approach, study design and arrangements
• Data analysis methods and techniques
• Validity threats and their control
• Summary of the current status of the research and planned next steps

Participants in the symposium are required to:

• submit and present a research plan,
• review and comment on up to two other research plans, and
• act as a scribe in one review session.

All papers must be submitted through  https://cmt3.research.microsoft.com/XP2017 in PDF format. Papers are limited to 6 pages, must be written in English and be formatted according to the LNBIP templates. Papers not following the formatting guidelines will be rejected without review.

Apprentices are also doctoral students, but at an earlier stage in their studies. Apprentices will attend the symposium and are encouraged to ask questions of the presenters, and will benefit from the feedback given to other students.

Observers are any other members of the agile software engineering research community who would like to attend the symposium. NOTE: Any observer or symposium advisor who is serving as a dissertation advisor to one of the participants is "kindly requested" to not speaking during the presentation and discussion of their student's work.

Important Dates 

16th January 2017 23rd January 2017 : Deadline for research plan submission

15th February 2017: Notification of Acceptance

28th February 2017: Camera-Ready Copy Due

22nd May 2017: Symposium

26th May 2017: Session notes sent to participants

For further information, please, send a message to stefan [dot] wagner [at] informatik [dot] uni-stuttgart [dot] de , Title´s tag: [XP DS].

Board of Advisors:

• Stefan Wagner, University of Stuttgart (chair)

• Daniel Méndez Fernández, TU Munich

• Darja Smite, Blekinge Institute of Technology

• Davide Taibi, Free University of Bolzano/Bozen

• Laurie Williams, NC State

• To be extended

I was very happy to be invited as a speaker to the 2016 DGLR Software Safety Workshop. In this workshop, avionics experts discuss experiences and advances in software safety. I presented STAMP/STPA as a general approach and our extension to it for connecting it to verification activities such as test case generation and model checking.

My slides are below:

I'm happy to give a talk at fortiss GmbH (a transfer institute of TU Munich) about our work on system-theoretic safety analyses and the connection to software.

Here are the slides:

The first German Requirements Night in Munich aims at brining requirements engineering specialists together in a relaxed atmosphere to discuss current topics.

I will give a talk on the results of our practice survey Naming the Pain in Requirements Engineering (NaPiRE). I will provide the slides here.

You can find details on the German Requirements Engineering here.

For details on NaPiRE see als http://www.re-survey.org.

And here are the slides from my talk:

Daniela Bortoletto (University of Oxford) and Steve McMahon (RAL) invited me to discuss the potential use of STAMP/STPA analysis in designing a new generation of silicon detectors for the ATLAS experiment.

The slides for my short talk are below:

The German-speaking software engineering conference comes to Vienna this year. Their web site is here. The concept of the conference series has been for some years now not to present original papers but give talks on papers already published elsewhere. A good step I think. Now we just need to go all the way and just ask for abstracts. Why should we only hear talks about old stuff?

Anyway, I'll give a talk on our results from the Naming the Pain in Requirements Engineering initiative. I'll present the design of the survey and our first results from Germany, but I will also peak into the results we have from the second run which was replicated in 14 countries.

My talk will take place on Wednesday, 24th February, at 14:00 in the room Rechte Pirouette.

Die Kollegen Bernd Brügge, Lukas Alperowitz (TUM), Horst Lichter, Andreas Steffens (RWTH Aachen) und Dirk Riehle (FAU Nürnberg) veranstalten zusammen mit der SE 2016 in Wien den ersten Workshop in Continuous Software Engineering.

Ich darf sie dabei als Mitglied im Programmkomitee unterstützen.

Sie können bis zum 13. Dezember Beiträge einreichen.

Details finden sich unter: http://cse2016.swc-rwth.de

I'm meeting with Walid Maalej and his group at the University of Hamburg. We are discussing collaboration possibilities and in this talk, I'm reporting on the research at my group with some details on recent results in naming the pain in requirements engineering and the relationship of type-3 clones and faults.

I am visiting the Software Engineering group headed by Prof. Rainer Koschke at the University of Bremen. I give a talk there on recent results we had in empirical studies on

• Typ-3 clones and faults
• Functionally similar clones (type-4 clones) and how they are syntactically different