Writing a thesis in our group

Are you a student at the University of Bayreuth and are interest in software engineering in general or in software analytics in particular? Then please reach out to us to discuss potential thesis topics! However, before you do, please carefully read the information on this page.

Prerequisites

We can only supervise a limited number of thesis projects in parallel. Please reach out to Prof. Dr. Sebastian Baltes to ask whether one of the group members currently has the capacity to accept a new thesis project. Students who write their thesis in our group should bring outstanding skills in one or more of the following areas:

modern software engineering
quantitative data analysis
qualitative data analysis
machine learning
natural language processing
information visualization

Having passed our lectures, seminars, or practical courses with a good grade is of course considered an asset. While there is no formal requirement to do your seminar or practical course in our group before starting your thesis project, doing so allows you to start developing your thesis proposal earlier.

Topics

Our thesis topics are usually related to our current research. When writing your thesis in our group, you as a student will independently conduct research. However, we will advise and guide you in this endeavour. A thesis project in our group usually involves writing code, and we will support you with that as well. Depending on the outcome of your research, there might even be the chance to publish and present your work at an international conference. We provide a list of potential thesis topics here (contact Prof. Dr. Sebastian Baltes to get the password), but you can always suggest your own topics as well. All topics should, however, be aligned with the research areas we cover.

Thesis Proposal

Together with an advisor from our group, you will develop a thesis proposal. The advisor, who is typically a doctoral or postdoctoral researcher in the group, will support you in drafting the proposal and will also advice you throughout your thesis project. A thesis proposal is usually not longer than four pages and contains the following information:

Thesis title: Start with a working title, can change over time.
Student: Name and student number.
Thesis type: Are you writing a bachelor or master thesis?
Advisor(s): Name(s) of your advisor(s).
Changelog: Your proposal draft usually undergoes iterations in discussion with your advisor and it makes sense to track the changes over time. A table with versions, dates, and summaries of implemented changes can help document these iterations.
Abstract: Short summary of your thesis based on the other sections mentioned below.
Introduction: Outlines the context, background, and motivation of your thesis project.
Research question(s): Which question(s) do you intend to answer with your thesis?
Related work: Briefly summarizes the literature review you have conducted while developing your thesis proposal.
Methodology/Features: Outlines how you attempt to answer your research questions, how you will collect and analyze data, if and how you design experiments, if and how you intend to implement a prototype, how you want to evaluate that prototype, and potentially already verifiable hypothesis for the experiments you plan. For prototype implementations, this section can also list potential features of the prototype.
Scope: Define the criteria that your thesis must fulfill to be successful. You can additionally outline optional criteria or explicitly define aspects to be out of scope.
Roadmap: Outlines when you want to reach which milestones in your thesis project, including dates, deliverables, success criteria for the milestones together with potential risks and how you intend to mitigate or react to them. Make sure to consider enough time for writing up your thesis after implementation, data collection, experiments, etc. are finished. You can create a Gantt chart to visualize the overall plan of your thesis project (GanttProject is one potential tool for that).
Bibliography: Lists all references used in your thesis proposal.

Drafting your thesis proposal is the first step of your thesis project. You thesis proposal serves as a blueprint for your thesis project and will also considerably help you writing your thesis later on. We provide a thesis proposal template here.

Thesis Project

Once a first draft of your thesis proposal is aligned with your supervisor, you can register your thesis and start tackling your research question(s) by collecting data, implementing a tool, setting up an experiment, or whatever is outlined in your thesis proposal. While you work on the project, we usually schedule meetings every second week in which you report on your progress and ask questions for which you need clarification to move forward.

Final Remarks

This page is based on Andreas Zeller’s guidelines.