New Trends in Software Construction & Full-scale Software Engineering

New Trends in Software Construction & Full-scale Software Engineering (2021)

[box type=“download”]Find the proceedings of this seminar here[/box]

We offer two computer science seminars, one for bachelor students and one for master students. The bachelor seminar is named New Trends in Software Construction 2021 and the master seminar Full-scale Software Engineering 2021. The general topics, prerequisites, seminar concept and the schedule are the same for both seminars. The bachelor and master seminar differ in their detailed topics and the performance requirements. We inform the participants about the available detailed topics prior to the kickoff meeting. The topics are assigned based on preferences provided by each seminar participant.

General topics

Software engineering is a broad area of study and research. Courses in software engineering usually focus on topics related to the development of software, e.g. requirements engineering, software design, implementation, testing, and project management. However, there are other topics that software engineers have to deal with, like the maintenance and operation of software, automation of parts of the software development process, and scalability of deployed applications. This seminar introduces students to software engineering activities, problems, and practices that go beyond the topics taught in our software engineering courses. The general topics include:

  • Test and test infrastructure automation
  • Enterprise architecture (debt) management
  • Technical debt management
  • Data-driven requirements engineering
  • Domain modelling
  • DevOps meets regulations
  • Project management of big data projects
  • Quality assessment of event-driven architectures
  • Compute resource usage optimization in hybrid clouds

Prerequisites

  • Provide a brief description of your motivation for participating in this seminar with your application via the computer science group’s seminar application system
  • Strong interest in software engineering
  • Strong interest in research
  • Write and talk in English
  • Basic LaTeX knowledge (recommended; can be learned in self-study in parallel to this seminar)

Seminar concept

The main goal of this seminar is to bring students closer to research by teaching how to write a scientific paper and how to present the findings. Consequently, the addressed topics are emerging questions in current research that will be tackled by students and supervisors. Moreover, this seminar will be conducted in a conference-like style. In the process, students will learn to

  • grasp a research problem;
  • search for literature;
  • write a paper;
  • submit their paper to the seminar’s internal research conference;
  • review papers of their fellow students and give feedback and, vice versa, receive review feedback; as well as
  • give a presentation that is focused / concise.

Moreover, to facilitate collaborative work, the students will write their paper in pairs of two.

Schedule

Note for the meetings, workshops and the presentation mentioned below that the participation is mandatory. Further, all deadlines are hard deadlines, i.e. not meeting a deadline means that the seminar is graded as failed. All deadlines are with respect to CET timezone.

Date Location What
01/04/2021 - Announcement of available topics in RWTHmoodle
11/04/2021 - Deadline to submit topic preferences
14/04/2021 - Announcement of topic and seminar supervisor assignment
14/04/2021 online meeting1 Kickoff meeting (information about the seminar organization)
15/04/2021 to 22/04/2021 online meeting2 Meeting with seminar supervisor (discuss topic and literature)
27.04.2021 13:00-14:30 online meeting1 Scientific writing workshop
02/05/2021 - Deadline to submit the outline of your paper to your supervisor
30/05/2021 - Deadline to submit the abstract and draft version of your paper to your supervisor
31/05/2021 to 04/06/2021 online meeting2 Meeting with seminar supervisor (discuss submitted draft)
02/06/2021 - Announcement of the seminar paper abstracts
06/06/2021 - Deadline to submit your review preferences for two other seminar papers
13/06/2021 - Deadline to submit the first version of your paper to the conference management system
14/06/2021 - Announcement of the peer-review assignment
27/06/2021 - Deadline to submit your review for two other seminar papers
29/06/2021 online meeting1 Academic presenting workshop
11/07/2021 - Deadline to submit the camera-ready version of your paper to the conference management system
05/07/2021 to 09/07/2021 online meeting2 Meeting with seminar supervisor (discuss prepared paper presentation)
18/07/2021 - Deadline to submit paper presentation
21 & 22/07/2021 13:00-16:30 online meeting2 Paper presentations at the internal seminar conference
August/September - Publication of the seminar papers on the SWC website
  1. participants are informed about the meeting details in the respective course room in RWTHmoodle
  2. participants have to make an appointment with their supervisor

Successful participation requirements

The participants have to meet the following requirements:

  • attend the kickoff meeting;
  • attend all meetings with their seminar supervisor;
  • meet all deadlines;
  • write a paper on their research topic (10 pages; in English; template will be provided);
  • review two fellow students’ papers (in English);
  • attend the workshops on Scientific Writing and Academic Presenting
  • give their final presentation (in English);
  • attend all presentations of the seminar; and
  • actively participate in the discussions following each presentation.

All requirements have to be met to pass the seminar and are considered in the grading. If you cannot meet one of the requirements for a good reason, contact your supervisor in advance / at the earliest time possible to discuss how to proceed.

Seminar coordination

Should you have any questions, please contact seminar@swc.rwth-aachen.de

Course information

Course type

Seminar

Semester:

Summer semester 2021

Course language
  • English
Course level
  • Bachelor
  • Master
Credit points 1

4

1: The actual number of credit points can vary depending on the study program's examination regulation version. Consult your examination regulation's module catalog or the campus information system to see the valid number of credit points.