Writing your Thesis at the Professorship of Software Engineering
The professorship focuses on the human factor in software engineering and understanding how people program. If you are interested in the people behind the screen and their thoughts and their needs, then this might be the right place for you to write your thesis. If you consider one of the topics we offer below, or have a concrete idea for a topic based on one of our research projects, you may contact us at: se-thesis@…
Currently, there are 2 spots available.
Information on External Theses
It is possible to receive an external thesis topic from outside the university, usually from industry. Before contacting us about supervising your external thesis, please consider the following:
- We do not supervise theses that require an NDA. We believe that a thesis should be published and that the results should be openly accessible.
- We do not supervise pure implementation projects. A thesis needs to show that you are able to do scientific work, thus your topic needs to contain a scientific research question. Simply implementing a software solution, as complicated or relevant it may be, does not fulfill that requirement.
Available Topics
1. Developing a Study-Set-up to Measure Code Cloze Probability
Additional info: Cloze probability refers to the likelihood that people will fill a gap in a sentence with a specific word. In linguistics, there are established standards for conducting such tests. However, no such standard currently exists for measuring cloze probability in code. Questions in this area include how much context is needed in the code and the optimal size of the gap.
2. Exploring the Types of Programming Errors Made by Expert Programmers
Additional Information
- Theses can be written in German or English.
- You can find tips on how to develop a topic and further information about the process of writing a thesis in the OPAL course Research at the Professorship of Software Engineering.
- You can also take a look at completed theses from our professorship to get an idea of how a thesis looks like and what kinds of topics are possible.
