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Impressions from Christa Schwanninger’s Talk on Product Line Engineering

Today, Christa Schwanninger of Siemens Drive Technologies lectured on Product Line Engineering. Thank you, Christa, for helping us make the Software Architecture practical and industry-oriented! Below, please find some photo impressions.

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Wolfgang Mauerer on Statistics in Nailing your Thesis

Today, Wolfgang Mauerer of Siemens Corporate Technology lectured on statistics and regressions, providing students in Nailing your Thesis with a refresher of the math necessary for our open source analytics work. Thank you, Wolfgang, for your continued help!

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FAU in Top Third of German Entrepreneurship Ranking

The chair of Geograhpy studies at LMU published an entrepreneurship ranking of German universities, see this PDF. FAU’s total score is in the top third, place 21, up from place 34 two years earlier. I’m not entirely sure how to interpret it, but one thing about FAU stands out: On the dimension of Entrepreneurship education, it scores bottom third, hurting its overall score.

I’m not sure this is a fair assessment, or maybe if it is, the question of why needs to be asked. That the recent EXIST IV funding round directed all money to Munich, Bavaria’s capital, rather than some to Nuremberg, Bavaria’s second largest city, is not going to help. But if entrepreneurship education needs improvement, the OSR Group is doing its part. With FIRM, PROD, and AMOS we are offering three entrepreneurship related classes to students.

In particular the AMOS lab course has spawned the Mydosis startup, which recently received seed stage funding of about EUR 100K. We are now working on the successor, Free Seas Ahoy! while still supporting Mydosis. From my (professorial) perspective, the ranking results support my current approach: Rather than trying to be a broad platform for many startups, I’m hands-on with exactly one startup per year.

Nicole Kimmelmann on Grounded Theory and Interview Analysis

Today in Nailing your Thesis we were happy to have Prof. Nicole Kimmelmann of FAU’s own WiSo faculty as a guest speaker. Her topic was Grounded Theory and specifically, interview analysis. Since several students chose interview analysis as their class thesis, we expect this to have been very useful! Below, please find the usual photo impressions.

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Martin Jung on Software Architecture in the new ARCH Seminar

Dr. Martin Jung is an industry lecturer who jointly with Prof. Riehle leads this semesters Software Architecture (ARCH) seminar. He shared some of his experiences with us before we will be starting with student presentations. Below please find a few photo impressions from his talk on software architecture. Enjoy!

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The Case for German University Outreach to China

My university, the Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nurnberg (FAU) is a renowned general university with a strong engineering faculty and tradition. While highly attractive from an educational point of view, it has remained hard to attract sufficiently large numbers of students to this beautiful college town.

China is a booming economy with a hunger for education. Chinese engineering students, after finishing their Bachelor’s degree, often look to getting a Master’s education abroad. Most look to the U.S.A. first, only to discover the high cost of tuition. The smart students realize that unless they are getting into the small percentage of top engineering schools, U.S. universities are not worth it: The quality of education, despite their good-looking certificates, rapidly falls off once you look beyond the well-known schools.

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Impressions from Suse Product Management Talk by Gerald Pfeifer and Holger Dyroff

Today, Dr. Gerald Pfeifer and Holger Dyroff, Director of Product Management and VP of Business Development at Attachmate’s Suse business unit, respectively, presented about open source product management in the PROD seminar. Focus of the talk and the engaged discussion with students was open source as a collaborative software development effort, as well as how to build a business on top of it. Below, please find some photo impressions from the class. To Herrn Pfeifer and Dyroff we would like to say a big thank you for teaching us!

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Impressions from Prof. Hindel lecturing in The Firm

Today Prof. Bernd Hindel lectured in “The Firm”, our seminar on how software product firms work. Prof. Hindel is both an honorary professor of the computer science department and the CEO of local but internationally operating software engineering firm Methodpark. The topic today was finances and legal, and despite what seemed like a dry topic, students were complete and listening attentively. Below, please find some photo impressions from the lecture.

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Impressions from Anja Schwarz’s Talk on Requirements Engineering

Today, in PROD, the product management seminar, Anja Schwarz of Sophist GmbH reported about her life as a requirements engineer (including roles, practices, and techniques of requirements engineering). Below, you can find some photo impressions. Thank you, Frau Schwarz, for your presentation!

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Impressions from Michael Kircher’s AMOS Talk on Scaling Agility

Today, Michael Kircher, department manager at Siemens Healtcare, introduced “scaling agility” (read: large-scale distributed Scrum) to the students of the 2011 AMOS Project class. Students were listening and questioning attentively. Some impressions below. Thank you, Michael, for teaching us!

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