In winter semester 2013/14, the research groups

• AG Software Engineering: Processes and Management
• AG Softwaretechnik
• AG Software Engineering: Dependability

offer a Master and Bachelor seminar on topics in software engineering (cf. 89-3372/89-3311).

• First topic allocation meeting: Thursday, 18 July 2013, 17:15, Room 34/420
• Kickoff meeting: Thursday, 24 October 2013, 17:15, Room 32/349
   All interested students including those who have topics must attend this meeting.
  The seminar introduction slides is available here.
• Deadlines:
  • Table of contents: Friday, 29 November 2013
  • Preliminary version: Monday, 13 January 2014, 23:59 CET
  • Review: Friday, 24 January 2014, 23:59 CET
  • Final version: Friday, 7 February 2014, 23:59 CET
  • Slides: Wednesday, 12 February 2014
•  All documents must be sent to your supervisor and Ilham Kurnia. Deadlines will be strictly enforced.
  The time plan for the deadlines distributed in the kickoff meeting can be downloaded here (updated with the slides deadline).
• The presentation will be held on 13–14 February 2014. The timetable for presentation is to available below.
• The certificates are now available from AG Softech secretary, Judith Stengel.

The following table lists the submission status of each participating student.

The following table lists the presentation schedule. All presentations will take place at Room 32/349 (the same room as the kickoff meeting).

The following table presents the list of topics on offer (which will be updated as more topics become available) and the respective supervisor. Students are advised to contact the supervisor of their topic of choice as soon as possible because the topic allocation principle is first-come-first-serve. When the “Student” field in the table below contains an entry, it indicates that the corresponding topic has already been chosen and is no longer available to other students.
 A student may not apply for two or more topics simultaneously.

The following table presents the list of topics on offer for this semester, the respective supervisors and the students to whom the topics are allocated to.

The goal of a seminar is to introduce students to the major constituent of scientific method that is concerned with critically reading, understanding, summarizing, explaining and presenting existing scientific papers. The following links present this goal in more detail: General guidelines for seminars in English and German. This seminar in particular provides the students opportunity to get acquainted with the research in software engineering.

Successful participation in the seminar requires:

• Term Paper
• Term Paper Review
• Presentation

Term paper (Preliminary and Revised Versions)

• Master students: Approximately 15 (fifteen) pages (excluding table of contents, title page, references, figures)
• Bachelor students: Approximately 10 (ten) pages (excluding table of contents, title page, references, figures)

The term paper must be written in LNCS Style, a popular medium for efficient dissemination of new developments from all areas of computer science. The LaTeX template with instructions can be downloaded here (local copy), while the Microsoft Word template is available here (local copy).

Here are some advice on writing your term paper in addition to the general guidelines:

• Mike Ashby. How to write a paper. April 2005
• Han Xiao. How to write a seminar report. January 2013

Term paper review

• Each student reviews two term papers
• A review contains
  • Title of the reviewed paper
  • Summary
  • Comments to the author
  • Positive and negative aspects
  • At least 400 words (that is, at least 1 page)
• The reviews must be submitted as plain text files whose names are as given in the email sent to the student.

The following links provide some guidelines how the review should be done. Although they are geared more towards paper reviews in a scientific conference/journal setting, many of the reviewing concepts are still applicable in this review task.

• Timothy Roscoe. Writing reviews for systems conferences. March 2007
• Alan Jay Smith. The task of the referee. IEEE Computer 23(4), pp. 65-71, April 1990
• Hugh Davis. How to review a paper. January 2007

Presentation

Every student must give a presentation on his topic. The time structure of a presentation is listed below.

• 20 min. presentation for Master students (hard deadline!)
• 15 min. presentation for Bachelor students (hard deadline!)
• 10 min. Q & A and comments on presentation style

Some bright people have given up their time to write some tips on how to do a presentation. As with other tips given on this page, we can’t encourage you enough to read them.

• Paul N. Edwards. How to give an academic talk. January 2013
• Bruce Donald. How to give a talk.
• Simon Peyton Jones, John Hughes, John Launchbury. How to give a good research talk. November 1993

The general seminar guidelines also contain good tips.

• Plagiarism
• Non-observance of deadlines
• Non-observance of compulsory attendance
• Poorly written term paper (e.g. failed scope)
• Superficial reviews
• Bad presentation
• No participation at discussion rounds
• …

On the topic of plagiarism: here are some sources to help you avoid plagiarizing the work of others: 1, 2, 3, 4.

If you have any questions concerning our seminar please send an e-mail to Ilham Kurnia.

Below are the links to homepages of several previous seminars. More links are available from ELSA (use the search tool with the search term “Seminar: Software Engineering”). Valuable tips can also be obtained from these sites.

• Summer semester 2013
• Winter semester 2012/13
• Summer semester 2012
• Winter semester 2011/12