Lutz Prechelt's Homepage
I am professor of Informatics and head of the
software engineering research group (AG SE).
- Consultation-hour / Sprechstunde
- To fix a date for oral examinations, please turn to my secretary.
- Oral exams for Bachelor/Master entail the material of one course and take 20 minutes.
- The choice between written test (Klausur) and oral exam is given only for SWT and only for students in the 2007 Studienordnung (no consultation required). For all other subjects, oral exams are an option if you have failed the Klausur or are unable to attend the Klausur in which case consultation is required. In case of doubt come to my consultation-hour.
- Oral exams for Diplom (Praktische Informatik) entail the material of two courses (one 4 hours and one 2 hours of lectures) and take 30 minutes.
- I am the local representative of the German Informatics Society (Gesellschaft für Informatik e.V. (GI)) / GI-Botschafter. Feel free to ask about GI.
- Teaching of my working group: Course information
- General StudentInfo
Short vita
I was born in
Bielefeld
in
1965.
I received the degree of Diplom-Informatiker (~M.Sc.) from
Universität Karlsruhe
in
1990
with a
thesis on parsing German sentences.
I stayed there at the
Institut für Programmstrukturen und Datenorganisation and got my Ph.D.
in
1995
with a
thesis revolving around
constructive neural network learning algorithms and
compiler construction for parallel computers.
When I received an offer to found a
research group on empirical software engineering, I decided to stay further. That work led to my
Habilitation
in
2000
based on a book on
empirical methodology in software engineering.
At that point I decided I needed to learn something else entirely and
I applied for a job in industry.
In April 2000, I joined
abaXX Technology (now merged into
Cordys merged into
Crealogix),
where I held various positions as a department head
(Quality Assurance, Training, Process Management, Technical Documentation)
and eventually became Chief Technology Officer.
I left abaXX in July 2003 to become full professor at
Freie
Universität Berlin.
Research interests and past work
I started my research career in
artificial intelligence
(first
natural language processing [
YAKR],
then
neural network learning algorithms
[
Prune,
Stopping,
CasCor])
and then extended it into
compiler construction [
Cupit,
reapar] in
the realm of
parallel computing.
I have largely left all of these fields today.
I have early been interested in
research methodology and
research quality.
This first led me to create a benchmark collection
called
Proben1 for neural network learning algorithms in 1994
[
Proben1,
NNbench],
which still appears to be
somewhat popular.
The same year, I participated in an assessment of the amount of
empirical evaluation performed in the software engineering literature
[
Expeval]
and performed an analogous one for articles about neural network
learning methods [
NNeval].
I then switched the research area and eventually wrote
a methods book on controlled experimentation in software engineering
(which I was silly enough to publish in German) in 2000
[
experiments].
More work related to research methods and research quality will follow.
In 1995, I switched my field of research to
empirical software engineering
and performed
controlled experiments on a number of topics:
type-checking [
tcheck],
inheritance depth [
Inherit],
design pattern use [
PatMain],
design pattern documentation [
PatDoc],
and the Personal Software Process [
pspe].
(Except for the one on inheritance depth, all of these experiments
were the first of their kind.)
I am also quite open to taking
opportunities when they present themselves.
Over the years, this has led to a number of interesting studies
regarding for instance
design pattern recovery [
PAT],
plagiarism detection [
jplag],
and melody recognition [
Tuneserver].
When starting afresh after my stint in industry,
I shifted to a much more
qualitative research approach,
because, as you might have guessed by now, I like exploratory work
and quantitative methods have a dubious cost/benefit ratio
for such purposes.
Most of my group's work is now qualitative and revolves around
Open Source Software processes and
Pair Programming.
However, some quantitative work is also left and concerns
comparing development platforms.
See
ResearchHome for some more information on current work and my
personal bibliography or our
workgroup bibliography
for publications.
Software
Honorary administrative and scientific service
Administrative:
Scientific:
Scientific consulting
I offer consulting (Beratung) and appraisals (Gutachten) in the following topic areas:
- all areas of the software process: software process models, software process management, software process improvement, software development methods and methodology
- empirical software engineering studies and their methodology
- human factors in software development
- software architecture and design