The AMOS project is the flagship class taught by the Open Source Research group. It is a combined lecture + programming course in which students learn about and experience an agile software engineering process. It combines agile methods (Scrum, XP) with open source practices while aiming to deliver real software that fills a real need for a customer.

We are always looking for people who are willing to engage with us on a project level and be our customers. See our post on the 2010 AMOS Project to get an impression of what this means. If you are interested, please contact Prof. Riehle. You may want to read the AMOS Project Concept slides which will give you an initial idea of how the project works.

Summary: Continuous deployment is the name of an engineering practice where a commit to a project’s code repository is put into production without any intermediate human intervention. It is the next step after continuous integration and it is all the rage in agile methods circles and for web applications. This (Studien/Diplom/Bachelor/Master) thesis reviews the current practice of continuous deployment and applies it to the Open Source Research Group’s software projects.

Read more on http://osr.cs.fau.de/fun or contact Prof. Riehle

The 2010 AMOS Praktikum development team says thank you to Google for sponsoring the Praktikum! If you would like to know more about the AMOS Praktikum (project) please contact Prof. Riehle.

The OSR Group’s Agile Methods and Open Source (AMOS) 2010 Praktikum concluded this week with the delivery of DosIS 1.0 to its customer. DosIS is a web application + mobile app for collaboratively editing and quality-assuring a dosage information database used by practicing pediatricians. We call it (the technology for) a Wikipedia of Dosage Information. You can find the source code at dosis.sourceforge.net.

Tuesday this week we demoed the software at the Erlangen University Hospital, in the IMI Kolloquium. On Wednesday, our customer, Dr. Stefan Bernitzki of the Cologne University Hospital, provided the final review and sign-off for the software. We had a blast (and some pain) watching him use the software and walk through the features.

DosIS 1.0 is available on the web as a live application at http://mydosis.de.

Die Studenten des AMOS Programmierpraktikums werden am 20.07.10 im Kolloquium des Instituts für medizinische Informationssysteme vortragen (und vorführen!).

Titel: Eine Wikipedia zur gemeinschaftlichen Entwicklung und Qualitätssicherung von Dosierungsinformationen für praktizierende Ärzte

Zusammenfassung: MyDosIS ist ein medizinisches Informationssystem für Dosierungsinformation fuer praktizierende Kinderärzte. Der Ansatz gleicht Wikipedia: Ärzte erarbeiten und diskutieren Dosierungsinformation kollaborativ und stellen die Qualität sicher. Die unterstützende Software wurde dieses Semester in der Informatik an der FAU entwickelt unter Mitarbeit eines Kinderarztes des Uni-Klinikum Kölns. Die Software besteht aus einem ueber das Internet nutzbaren Webdienst sowie einer auf Android-Handys verfügbaren App, welche den mobilen Einsatz unterstützt. Das Projekt nimmt jetzt den Betrieb auf. In diesem Vortrag berichten wir über das studentische Projektkonzept, den Wikipedia-ähnlichen Ansatz hinter MyDosIS, und die Anforderungen an das System. Zum Schluss wird die Software von den Studenten vorgeführt.

Das Kolloquium steht für alle interessierten Personen offen.

Two photos from today’s TechFak Sommerfest; the OSR Group went there right after it opened, and we are expecting music all day long (while working… :-))

The Bavaria California Technology Center has awared our group some funds to move forward with our “Reengineering Wikitext” project. Below please find a short research project summary (in German).

Zusammenfassung: MediaWiki ist die Software, auf deren Basis Wikipedia betrieben wird. MediaWiki Inhalte werden in Wikitext geschrieben, welches eine Markup- und Programmiersprache ist, die sich über acht Jahre lang ohne eine formale Syntax und Semantik entwickelt hat. Das, was MediaWiki macht, ist allein durch die Implementierung der Software bestimmt. Die Open-Source-Forschungsgruppe an der Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg ist dabei, diese Sprache zu formalisieren und einen neuen alternativen Parser sowie Ausführungsmaschine zu entwickeln. Diese Implementierung wird eine signifikante Verbesserung in der Maschinenverarbeitbarkeit von Wikipedia-Inhalten mit sich bringen. Aus diesem Grund arbeitet die Forschungsgruppe mit der Wikimedia Foundation in San Francisco, CA, U.S.A. zusammen, was gleichzeitig die BaCaTeC-Förderungen bewirkte.

Der Webplatz der deutschen Forschungsgruppe: http://osr.cs.fau.de
Der Webplatz des amerikanischen Partners: http://www.wikimedia.org

On June 16, 2010, Linda Rising visited the Agile Methods and Open Source (AMOS) Praktikum at the Friedrich-Alexander-University of Erlangen-Nürnberg. Linda is an agile method experts of world renown, and she taught a lecture on project retrospectives. She also led an actual retrospective exercise for the AMOS Project. The AMOS project is the OSR Group’s staple programming course. This semester, it is developing the DosIS open source software project, a medical information system for pediatricians.

Linda Rising lecturing

Linda hard at work

Full house!

Student asking a question

Our tweet stream provides some review of Linda’s insightful lecture:

• Successful retrospective don’t name and blame – helps focus on problem; if you name then praise #AMOS
• Norm Kerth’s Prime Directive of Retrospectives: Assume that everyone did the best they could #AMOS
• Retrospectives help learn from experiences; bring out experience, help find closure #AMOS
• People believe we learn from experience; but then she has that friend who got married 5 times #AMOS
• Software development misses experiments; projects operate on faith way too much #AMOS
• On an agile project, each iteration should involve a few small experiments #AMOS
• Last but important question to ask in a #retrospective: What still puzzles us? #AMOS

The last tweet was:

• Linda Rising at #FAU now leading a #retrospective in Agile Methods and Open Source class project #AMOS

It was the last tweet, because now the real experience began and we had all hands full! Linda led us through the following retrospectives best practices:

• Create safety
• Define success
• Offer appreciations
• Build time-line
• Show artifacts
• Define experiments
• Summarize learnings
• Hopes and wishes

Brown-bag lunch setup

Some project artifacts

Everyone is learning, even Herr Professor

Students hard at work

Capturing learnings: puzzles (here)

Maybe the most important exercise was creating a time-line. Here is how it looked like:

Blackboard prepared for time-line exercise

Attentive students

Linda explaining how time-line works

Students building the time-line

Student reading the time-line

Linda helping explaining the time-line

The final time-line

Linda is a great speaker and facilitator who works magic. This guest lecture and exercise of the AMOS Praktikum was certainly a highlight of the course. The AMOS team, instructors and students, would like to say thank you very much!

Auch dieses Jahr möchten wir Sie wieder auf die vom 15.-17. Oktober 2010 stattfindende Ferienakademie in Tutzing aufmerksam machen und auf diesem Wege herzlich bitten, interessierte Studentinnen und junge Wissenschaftlerinnen über das vielseitige Angebot der Akademie im malerischen Ambiente des Tutzinger Schlosses am Starnberger See zu informieren.

Die diesjährige Akademie trägt den Titel “Mobil und Global. Kommunikationsformen im Wandel” und beschäftigt sich gemäß des berühmten Zitats “Man kann nicht nicht kommunizieren” von Paul Watzlawick mit Fragen nach den Folgen, technischen Möglichkeiten und sozialen Beschränkungen des Kommunikationswandels.

Die Akademie findet in Kooperation der Büros der Frauenbeauftragten der Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg, der LMU, der TUM, der Bundeswehrhochschule München sowie der Evangelischen Akademie Tutzing statt.

Nähere Informationen können Sie gerne dem beigefügten Programm sowie unserer Homepage unter http://www.frauenbeauftragte.uni-erlangen.de/massnahmen-und-projekte/ferienakademie.shtml entnehmen. Hier finden Sie auch Hinweise zu den interessanten Veranstaltungen der beteiligten Erlanger Professorinnen und Mitarbeiterinnen.

In Germany, today (2010), primary and secondary education take 12 school years and when finished successfully, allow you to enter college. College provides three main degrees you can achieve, a Bachelor, a Master, and a Ph.D. At the University of Erlangen, the Bachelor degree typically takes three years and the Master degree takes an additional two years. You can achieve them only one after another, and they replace what used to be the German “Diplom.”

The Ph.D. title is also called the doctor title and upon successful completion, you’ll be allowed to carry the prefix “Dr.” in front of your name (rather than a trailing “Ph.D.”) If you see a “Dr.” in front of a name it does not imply a medical degree but could be a degree of any science. My department, the technical faculty of the University of Erlangen provides a traditional “Dr. Ing.” which is a doctor of engineering.

There is no coursework to be performed as part of your Ph.D. studies. All there is to do is to perform research that delivers non-trivial (“significant”) scientific progress, write it up as your dissertation, and get it past your reviewers. This research is guided rather than independent research, and your guide is your advisor (and primary reviewer).

To be allowed into the Ph.D. program, you need to have the equivalent of a European Master’s degree. If your degree was awarded by an accredited European university you are probably home free. If you have only a Bachelor degree, you will likely have to get a Master degree first before you can enter the Ph.D. program. In any case, the university reserves the right to review your actual studies (transcript) and see whether it matches the equivalence requirement.

Thus, getting a (European) Master degree is equivalent to passing your qualifying exams in the Ph.D. program of an accredited U.S. university. You are ABD, “all but dissertation”.

However, the notion of “Ph.D. program” is somewhat different between Germany and the U.S. For one, there is no implied funding. However, there is also no or only minimal tuition. Thus, students need to find their own funding to cover living expenses. The two most common ways are to get a job at the University or being self-sponsored, for example, by working in an industrial research lab while working on your dissertation. There are additional options, for example, there are plenty of grants to be had. Perhaps the most common one is the Graduiertenkolleg. Some of these though come with strings attached and may require regular participation in seminars or the like. In general, there are plenty of roads to a German Dr. title.

Getting a job at the university is similar to getting a TA or RA position at a U.S. university, however, it is officially an employment relationship. Moreover, your manager is a particular professor, the one who brought in the funding that is paying your salary. Typically, this employment is on a two-year contract continued on an annual basis after these initial two years until you finish your dissertation work.

This then is the final and maybe most important difference to the U.S. system: You are hired by a particular professor for your dissertation work. There is no departmental selection process. You don’t apply to the department, you apply for a job at a particular professorship.

I hope this clarifies some of the questions one might have on what it means to become a Ph.D. student in Germany.