Description

Release engineering is a software engineering discipline concerned with the development, implementation, and improvement of processes to deploy high-quality software reliably and predictably. It deals with all activities in between regular development and delivery of a software product to the end user, e.g., integration, build, test execution, packaging and delivery of software. Although research on this topic goes back for decades, the increasing heterogeneity and variability of software products along with the recent trend to reduce the release cycle to days or even hours starts to question some of the common beliefs and practices of the field.

Addressed topics this year:

• Continuous Delivery of Desktop/Mobile Apps
• Organizational Approach: DevOps
• Improving the Build Pipeline
• Infrastructure as Code
• Deployment at Scale

Seminar Concept

While this seminar also teaches students how to write a scientific paper and present it, the main goal of this seminar is to bring students closer to research. 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 search for literature, gasp a research problem, use a popular conference management tool, review papers of fellow students, and prepare a good and straight-to-the-point presentation.

1. Kick-off meeting: First meeting to discuss the research question, direction, and strategy
2. Research and find your topic
3. Discuss topic, literature, etc. with supervisor
4. Narrow your research question
5. Discuss outline and related work with supervisor
6. Submit an abstract to a conference management system
7. Submit a draft version of a paper to your supervisor
8. Submit first version to the conference management system
9. Review two other papers
10. Polish your paper and submit final version to the conference management system
11. Create, review with supervisor, and submit a presentation for the paper
12. Present your paper at the end

Dates

Here are the preliminary dates and deadlines):

• 20.10.2015 10:15-11:45 Kick-off meeting in room 9u09 (E3)
• 21.-23.10.2015 Appointment with supervisor: Discuss topic, literature, etc.
• 02.-06.11.2015 Appointment with supervisor: Discuss outline and related work
• 13.11.2015 Deadline: Submit abstract to EasyChair
• 04.12.2015 Deadline: Email draft version of your paper to your supervisor
• 09.-11.12.2015 Appointment with supervisor: Feedback on draft version
• 18.12.2015 Deadline: Submit first version of your paper to EasyChair
• 08.01.2016 Deadline: Submit reviews to EasyChair
• 12.01.2016 10:15-11:45 Academic Presenting (part 1) in room 9u09 (E3)
• 15.01.2016 Deadline: Submit final version of your paper to EasyChair
• 18.01.2016 Deadline: Email draft presentation to your supervisor
• 19.01.2016 10:15-11:45 Academic Presenting (part 2) in room 9u09 (E3)
• 19.-22.01.2016 Appointment with supervisor: Feedback on presentation draft
• 29.01.2016 Deadline: Submit final presentation to EasyChair
• 04.02.2016 (09:00-18:00) Presentations in room 9u09 (E3)

Note that all appointments, i.e., the kick-off meeting (in the beginning), the academic presenting workshop, the presentation days (in the end), and your appointments with your supervisor are mandatory!

Prerequisites

• Strong interest in software engineering
• Strong interest in research
• Basic LaTeX knowledge
• Write and talk in English

Requirements

• 1 research vision (short abstract in English)
• 6-pages paper on a research topic (in English)
• 2 reviews of 2 follow students’ papers (in English)
• 1 presentation (in English)
• 2 discussion questions (for 2 presentations)
• Attend kick-off meeting
• Attend all appointments with the supervisor
• Attend all presentations of FsSE 2016 and CTRelEng 2016

Contact

Dipl.Inform. Andreas Steffens seminar@swc.rwth-aachen.de