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By Dirk Riehle, on February 5th, 2012
We currently have plenty of Bachelor and Master Thesis opportunities available that focus on product management. Specifically, these are case-writing theses. In such a thesis, you will work with an industry partner (and us) to analyse a specific situation that the industry partner once faced. Typically, that situation was about making a difficult decision. The industry partner provides the specifics of the situation and we help you with the underlying concepts needed to analyse the situation. The result of your work is a “case” that describes the situation and that we intend to use in future teaching. The case will be made available for free.
Please let us know if you are interested. Just send an email to Prof. Riehle. Also, a great way to get started or just get an impression is to take the Product Management seminar.
By Dirk Riehle, on October 12th, 2011
Herr Meier was staring at this quarter’s revenue numbers for their enterprise software product. He should be very happy: Substantial maintenance revenue from several large customers was making the product profitable. Yet he wasn’t. A deluge of one-off change requests from these large customers was stifling product innovation, threating to make the product fall behind the competition. Yet, they had to support their customers or face substantial revenue shortfalls. In this Master Thesis, you will retrace the steps of Herr Meier, the chief product strategist of a company local to the region, and analyze the situation. You will have to understand and describe the complex situation of a successful software product facing multiple options for future evolution and argue the pros and cons of any such option. Finally, you will write up the situation as a Business school case [1] to be used in future product management classes at our university.
Continue reading Thesis Opportunity: Should You Disrupt Your Customers?
By Dirk Riehle, on September 23rd, 2011
About two years ago, a company local to the Nuremberg area had to make a decision whether to open source their closed source enterprise software. This is a difficult decision: Does open sourcing mean you’ll lose your bread-winning revenue streams? Or will you open up new markets and win big? In this Master Thesis, you will retrace the steps of this company and how it came to make its decision. You will have to gather and review the underlying economic concepts that drive commercial open source. A core part of the thesis will the writing of a “business case” following the Harvard Business School Case Method [1] to illustrate the situation the company was facing. This case will be used in teaching Product Management at our university in the future [2].
Continue reading Thesis Opportunity: To Open Source or Not to Open Source
By Dirk Riehle, on September 23rd, 2011
Some software firms move some or all of their software development to foreign nations to take advantage of lower labor costs in those other countries. One example are German firms performing joint software development projects with firms located in China. While financially attractive, such projects are difficult to realize, and many projects fail. This Master Thesis provides a literature and conceptual review of the challenges of distributed development and international project management between Germany and China, and will conduct an experiment in distributed projects between two software engineering classes, one held at University of Erlangen, and one held at Tsinghua University. The experiment will test a particular hypothesis as to what makes such projects more effective and reports about the results of the experiment.
Continue reading Thesis Opportunity: An Experiment in German-Chinese Collaboration
By Dirk Riehle, on June 18th, 2011
You may have been reading Matt Aslett’s analysis of the trend to permissive licensing as well Gordon Half’s discussion of this trend. I enjoyed reading them and agree with the overall trend. I don’t quite agree with the predicted downfall of Copyleft licenses, though, and I love the irony of it.
Strong copyleft licenses play an important role in dual-core licensing as in single-vendor open source software. Copyleft is a tool by which vendors ascertain their (effective) ownership over some piece of software. Thus, the invention of copyleft benefits a specific commercial go-to-market strategy.
If you are a student at FAU and would like to further analyse this trend, please talk to me. We have a large database on open source project data and we’ve been looking for a competent student for a while to correlate various factors and how they contribute to open source community growth.
By Dirk Riehle, on January 27th, 2011
Wir möchten hiermit zwei Forschungsthemen ausschreiben für Softwareentwickler, die gern nebenberuflich promovieren möchten. Die zwei Forschungsgebiete sind:
- Gamification von Geschäftsoftware. Fragestellung: Wie sieht die Benutzungsschnittstelle der Geschäftssoftware der Zukunft aus? Welche psychologischen Aspekte und Elemente aus Benutzungsschnittstellen von Spielen verwendet sie? (Stichwort Gamification.)
- Sensemaking von Nutzungsdaten von Geschäftssoftware. Fragestellung: Anonymisiertes Tracking, Analyse, und Aufbereitung des Nutzerverhaltens von Geschäftssoftware zwecks Verbesserung dieser Software; Ableitung von Trends aufgrund von Nutzungsverhalten. (Stichwort Sensemaking.)
Die im Rahmen der Promotion (unter Betreuung durch Prof. Riehle) zu entwickelnden Theorien sollen an einem konkreten Beispiel erprobt werden, dem Mydosis Community-Portal für praktizierende Kinderärzte (Kurzbeschreibung von Mydosis). Bei Interesse wenden Sie sich bitte an Prof. Riehle.
By Dirk Riehle, on September 16th, 2009
Work Description
This Diplomarbeit looks at the use of design patterns in object-oriented software design. We will use the Booch software architecture catalog (and related materials) to assess a metric called design pattern density. One possible outcome of the Diplomarbeit could be a research paper with an abstract like this:
Design pattern density is a metric that assesses the percentage (density) of design patterns in a given object-oriented design. Experts have long believed that a high design pattern density implies a high maturity of the design under consideration. In prior work, we have defined the metric as well as an instrument to assess it in a given design. In this work, we assess the design pattern density of a large number of published object oriented designs. We validate the hypothesis about high maturity of design as well as several others. We conclude that the design pattern density metric is a valuable design-level metric to provide insight into the quality of a given design.
Necessary Skills
- You should enjoy object-oriented software designs
- You should know design patterns well
Contact Person
Dirk Riehle
Status
Open.
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