Upcoming Computer Science Colloquium on How does your Software look like? by Prof. Dr. Claus Lewerentz

The computer science department by way of our research group is hosting a colloquium talk (free and open to the public):

  • by: Prof. Dr. Claus Lewerentz
  • about: How does your Software look like?
  • on: October 24th, 2016, 16:15 Uhr
  • at: Room 01.150-128, Cauerstraße 11, 91058 Erlangen

Abstract: Software systems are complex intangible products and therefore hard to grasp and to communicate about. How can large teams of stakeholders in different roles build a common picture of a software under development. In order to understand software systems, their evolution during development processes, and to assess product and process quality appropriate visualizations become more and more crucial. The talk presents the concept of “software cities” as a uniform visualization and coherent communication approach for representing structural as well as process oriented information on software systems. The city metaphor supports orientation and spatial memory and allows for applying a wealth of cartographic representation techniques of multifaceted data. Specific system aspects or analysis scenarios can be illustrated using various thematic maps. Examples are “quality maps” depicting particular component properties or quality indicators, “effort maps” illustrating the contribution of developers, or “building site activity maps” showing development activities over time. Such software maps based were used in several large scale industry projects as part of quality assurance measures. We report about the experiences.

Speaker: Professor Claus Lewerentz holds a chair for Software and Systems Engineering at BTU Cottbus since 1994. He has studied Computer Science and Medicine at TU Munich (1977-1983) and got a PhD in Software Engineering from RWTH Aachen (1988). Further steps in his professional career were the position of a scientific assistant to the board of directors at the German National Research Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science in Sankt Augustin (1988-1991) and head of the software engineering department at the Computer Science Research Institute in Karlsruhe (1991-1994). His research work is concerned with the construction and analysis of large scale software systems and the development of analysis tools with a particular focus on software quality. Most recently he is working on the visualization of large software systems.