Doing a Thesis in the Software Engineering Group

If you are a student of Saarland University and have fun with automated program analysis, testing, and debugging, you should do a thesis with us. Here are the details on how this works.

Requirements

Due to capacity constraints, we can only accept a minimal number of students. If you bring outstanding skills in

• program analysis
• compiler construction and programming languages
• formal methods and automated reasoning
• machine learning and statistics

and/or

• have passed our courses on automated testing or automated debugging and/or our seminars with great success

then we’d love to hear from you.

Topic

If you want to do a thesis in our group, please send me a letter of motivation and your most recent transcript of records. Your motivation letter should also indicate how you satisfy the above requirements. I will then set up an appointment with you to discuss possible topics.

Topics will typically be related to our recent research interests. Have a look at our all-new ERC “Semantics of Software Systems” (S3) project (notably the research proposal) to get some inspiration. You will do actual research, and some students even had a chance to publish and present their work in front of an international audience.

You can suggest topics and express interests of your own. Third-party topics, however, are only acceptable as part of an established research cooperation.

Advisor

Once we have agreed on a topic, you will be assigned an advisor from my group – a Ph.D. student or PostDoc who you will closely work with. They will help you define your thesis proposal as part of the seminar.

Seminar

In the seminar phase, you are supposed to prepare your thesis. The seminar phase comprises the following steps:

Attendance

You have to attend the seminar regularly. Details will be sent to you by the seminar organization.

Preparation

Your advisor will give you literature to read and make you build a prototype or perform some preliminary experiments. This is important to help you understand your topic. You conduct this significant part of the seminar primarily in self-study.

Proposal

You have to write a thesis proposal that describes the goals of your thesis and the steps required to achieve those goals. See below.

Talk

Once the proposal is done, you have to give a talk in the seminar. Upon completing those steps, you get a certificate (Schein) for the seminar. Congratulations!

Thesis Proposal

Your proposal serves as a contract between you and our chair. It describes a well-defined task and its outcome as well as possible risks. This helps you finish your thesis on time and protects you from unexpected changes.

A thesis proposal is usually between 8 to 10 pages long and consists of the following:

1. Cover page including
   • thesis title
   • your name
   • date
   • revision information, if appropriate
   • names of supervisors and advisors
2. A short abstract (1-2 paragraphs)
3. An introduction into the field, the problem, and the proposed solution (one page max.)
4. A discussion of the related work that has been conducted before. Discuss how your proposed work is related (and how it advances the state of the art).
5. The method you want to use to address the problem. Explicitly state verifiable hypotheses.
6. The evaluation you want to use to assess how well your solution works. Provide details on verifying the hypotheses stated earlier (experiments, subjects, measures, …)
7. A schedule with verifiable milestones to be reached on a specific date. State potential risks for the proposal and their impact, as well as how to mitigate them, including alternatives.
8. Explicit success criteria that will help to assess your thesis, as a list of items:
   • Must-have criteria: Things your thesis must cover to be successful
   • May-have criteria: Things your thesis can cover to improve its value
   • Must-not-have criteria: Things your thesis will not cover (although one may think so)
9. A bibliography listing all references.

A proposal typically undergoes a number of revisions between you and your supervisor; once it officially is handed in, it serves as a blueprint for the thesis. Your proposal will be graded as part of the Seminar.

Thesis

The earliest you can start working on your thesis is right after you hand in your thesis proposal and give a talk at the seminar. As soon as you get the certificate for the seminar, you have to register your thesis in the same semester or the semester after you got the certificate.

After registering your thesis, you have to submit the thesis within the deadline set in the registration. For BSc students, this will typically be three months; for MSc students, this will be six months.

Successful completion of a thesis consists of the following steps:

1. Implementation. Typically, a thesis investigates a hypothesis. Depending on the concrete topic, you’ll have to implement a tool and possibly infrastructure to conduct experiments that prove or disprove the hypothesis.
2. Thesis. Once you have completed your experiments and collected the results, you can start writing the thesis.
3. Talk. You will present the results of your thesis in a 30-minute talk in the seminar.

Once you finish the steps described above, you will get a certificate (Schein) for the thesis. Congratulations!

Frequently Asked Questions

• Can I start my thesis during the semester? Yes, it is possible to start during the semester.
• I won’t be able to work full-time on my thesis. What can I do? Your study regulations allow you to apply for part-time study (and a part-time thesis). Contact the examination office for details.
• Can you extend the thesis deadline? Once the thesis is registered, extending the deadline is up to the examination office. You can apply for a deadline extension if you’re sick for a longer period.
• Can I continue working on my topic after completion? If you could not explore your topic fully and your advisor is also interested in continuing your work, it is sometimes possible to extend your work with a HiWi contract.