Course registration
Prerequisites
- Provide a brief description of your motivation for participating in this seminar with your application via the Computer Science department’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)
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:
- Modernization of legacy systems
- Technical debt management
- Software engineering for ML systems
- LLMs for software engineering
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 and apply until midnight on the corresponding day.
| Date | Location/Tool | What |
|---|---|---|
| 01/04/2025 | Moodle | Announcement of available topics |
| 10/04/2025 13:00 - 14:00 | 5055 | Participation mandatory - Kickoff meeting (information about the seminar organization) |
| 11/04/2025 | Moodle | Deadline to submit topic preferences |
| 12/04/2025 | Moodle | Announcement of topic and seminar supervisor assignment |
| 14/04/2025 to 17/04/2025 | Office/Online | Meeting with seminar supervisor (discuss topic and literature) |
| 19/04/2025 | RWTHOnline | Final date to validly deregister from the seminar |
| 27/04/2025 | E-Mail to supervisor | Deadline to submit the outline of your paper to your supervisor |
| 25/05/2025 | E-Mail to supervisor | Deadline to submit the abstract and draft version of your paper to your supervisor |
| 26/05/2025 to 30/05/2025 | Office/Online | Meeting with seminar supervisor (discuss submitted draft) |
| 01/06/2025 | EasyChair | Deadline to submit abstract |
| 02/06/2025 | EasyChair | Announcement of the seminar paper abstracts |
| 08/06/2025 | EasyChair | Deadline to submit your review preferences for the seminar paper to review |
| 15/06/2025 | EasyChair | Deadline to submit the first version of your paper |
| 16/06/2025 | EasyChair | Announcement of the peer-review assignment |
| 22/06/2025 | EasyChair | Deadline to submit your review for the seminar paper to review |
| 06/07/2025 | EasyChair | Deadline to submit the camera-ready version of your paper |
| 07/07/2025 to 11/07/2025 | Office/Online | Meeting with seminar supervisor (discuss prepared paper presentation) |
| 13/07/2025 | Email to seminar@swc | Deadline to submit paper presentation |
| 15/07/2025 14:00 - 17:30 | 9222 | Participation mandatory - Paper presentations at the internal seminar conference |
| August/September | SWC website | Publication of the seminar papers |
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 (8 pages including references in English; template will be provided);
- review one fellow students’ papers (in English);
- 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.