The Software Engineering Conference SE2025, organized by the Software Engineering division of the German Informatics Society (GI), will take place from February 24 to February 28, 2025, at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Karlsruhe, Germany.

The registration is now open. Further information can be found on the conference website: https://se2025.sdq.kastel.kit.edu/.

Organizing Committee: Anne Koziolek (General Chair), Anna-Lena Lamprecht, Thomas Thüm (Program Chairs), Sascha Alpers (Industry Chair), Lisa Sonnleithner, Kevin Feichtinger (Workshop Chairs), Ralf Reussner (Sponsoring Chair), Jan Keim (Local Chair), Tobias Hey (Publicity Chair), Erik Burger (Proceedings Chair)

At the ceremony of the VKSI award 2024, SDQ members and students received one award and two honorable mentions: Nils Niehues received the VKSI award for his master’s thesis “Intelligent Match Merging to Prevent Obfuscation Attacks on Software Plagiarism Detectors”, supervised by Timur Sağlam and Sebastian Hahner. Honorable mentions were awarded to Tom Hüller for his thesis “Automated Consistency of Legal and Software Architecture System Specifications for Data Protection Analysis”, supervised by Nicolas Boltz and Sebastian Hahner, and to Moritz Brödel for his final thesis “Preventing Automatic Code Plagiarism Generation Through Token String Normalization”, supervised by Timur Sağlam and Sebastian Hahner.

Timur Sağlam gave a keynote at the MODELS 2024 Educators Symposium on the topic Detecting Modelling Plagiarism: Navigating Automated Obfuscation and Generative AI. The international symposium took place at Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria, and was attended by educators, researchers and practitioners from the modelling community. An active discussion after the keynote gave these participants the possibility to exchange insights on the topic of plagiarism detection and teaching model-driven engineering.

On December 7, the SDQ Winter Day will take place starting at 3:45 pm at the Infobau (50.34) in front of room 325. In addition to presentations from research and industry, there will be free mulled wine, punch and waffles. There is also an opportunity to discuss thesis topics with members of the group. More information about the program can be found at: https://sdq.kastel.kit.edu/wiki/SDQ_Winter_Day.

Timur Sağlam and former DSiS members Jan Wittler and Thomas Kühn have received the Best Paper award at the 19th European Conference on Modelling Foundations and Applications (ECMFA) for their paper “Evaluating Model Differencing for the Consistency Preservation of State-Based Views“.

In their work, the researchers have developed a correctness notion for changes to models in the context of model-view consistency. This is an important contribution for  consistency in the development of Cyber-Physical Systems, a topic which is in the focus of research at DSiS.

Modern cyber-physical systems (CPS), such as cars or production plants, are full of electronic and mechanical components that are controlled by software. The system as a whole can only function if all these parts interact perfectly. Designing such systems poses the challenge of keeping the system architecture consistent att all times. New methods will be developped in a Collaborative Research Center (Sonderforschungsbereich) Consistency in the View-Based Development of Cyber-Physical Systems (Convide) at KIT, with a budget of 11 million € over four years.

Prof. Ralf Reussner is the speaker of this CRC, with members coming from the faculties of Informatics, Electrical Engineering as well as Mechanical Engineering. Furthermore, TU Munich, TU Dresden, and the University of Mannheim will participate in the CRC.

The paper entitled "Scalability Testing Automation using Multivariate Characterization and Detection of Software Performance Antipatterns" by DSiS members Robert Heinrich, Martina Rapp, Jörg Henß and collaboration partners from eSulab Solutions, Ericsson AB, Blekinge Institute of Technology, Gran Sasso Science Institute, Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, and University of Hamburg has been published in the Journal of Systems & Software.

Thomas Goldschmidt, Steffen Becker, and Erik Burger received the Most Influential Paper Award for their 2012 paper "Towards a tool-oriented taxonomy of view-based modelling". The award was presented at the conference MODELLIERUNG 2022 of the German Informatics Society (GI).

The paper can be accessed via the GI digital library: https://dl.gi.de/handle/20.500.12116/18148

Freitag, 1. Juli 2022 ab 16:30 Uhr im Informatikgebäude 50.34 (Am Fasanengarten 5), Raum –101 (Gerhard-Goos-Hörsaal)

Unter dem Thema "Software-Entwurf und Qualität" stellen sich die Forschungsgruppen für Zuverlässige Software-intensive Systeme und Modellierung für kontinuierliche Software-Entwicklung des KASTEL Instituts für Informationssicherheit und Verlässlichkeit vor. Wir laden Sie zu einem vielseitigen Programm ein, indem sich die Forschungsgruppen, ihre vielfältigen Forschungsgebiete sowie ihre Industriepartner vorstellen. Bei Getränken und Snacks wird hier allen Gästen ein direkter Einblick in die Forschung und Praxis der Software-Entwicklung geboten. Studierende können zusätzlich Kontakt zu Betreuerinnen und Betreuern zukünftiger Abschlussarbeiten knüpfen und ihr Interesse an der Erforschung und Verbesserung der Software-Entwicklung wecken lassen.

The paper entitled "Detecting Violations of Access Control and Information Flow Policies in Data Flow Diagrams" by Stephan Seifermann, Robert Heinrich, Dominik Werle and Ralf Reussner has been published in the Journal of Systems & Software. The paper is about considering confidentiality in early software designs given as data flow diagrams. The presented approach allows designers to model and analyze systems using various commonly used confidentiality policies. The paper is an open access publication.

Two awards and two honorable mentions have been given to members of the Institute of Information Security and Dependability (KASTEL). The association of software engineers in Karlsruhe (Verein der Karlsruher Software-Ingenieure e.V./VKSI) award students for excellent bachelor’s and master’s theses every year. This year, Larissa Schmid (from the group Modelling for Continuous Software Engineering, Prof. Anne Koziolek) receives the VKSI award for an excellent thesis on foundations of software engineering. Her master’s thesis has the title "Modeling and Simulation of Message-Driven Self-Adaptive Systems". Sebastian Hahner (from the group Dependability of Software-intensive Systems, Prof. Ralf Reussner) receives the award for an excellent thesis in applied software engineering. His master’s thesis has the title "Domain-specific Language for Data-driven Design Time Analyses and Result Mappings for Logic Programs". Honorable mentions for their final theses go to Dominik Fuchß and David Monschein.

The 18th International Conference on Software Architecture (ICSA'21) awarded the ICSA'21 10-years Most Influential Paper Award to the paper "PerOpteryx: automated application of tactics in multi-objective software architecture optimization" by Anne Koziolek, Heiko Koziolek, and Ralf Reussner.

ICSA is the premier venue for practitioners and researchers interested in software architecture, in component-based software engineering and in quality aspects of software and how these relate to the design of software architectures. ICSA has a strong tradition as a working conference, where researchers meet practitioners and software architects can explain the problems they face in their day-to-day work and try to influence the future of the field.

The paper entitled "Enabling consistency in view-based system development — The Vitruvius approach" has been published in Journal of Systems & Software.The paper is about a holistic system development approach using multiple languages and tools to describe a software or software-intensive technical system from different viewpoints. This so called Vitruvius approach enables stakeholders to only deal with views containing information about the system that is relevant for their specific concerns. It especially provides formalized methods and languages to preserve consistency between the artifacts described in the used languages in an automated or semi-automated way.

The paper is available as open access.

The paper "Automatically Improve Software Architecture Models for Performance, Reliability, and Costs Using Evolutionary Algorithms" by Anne Koziolek (Martens), Heiko Koziolek, Steffen Becker and Ralf Reussner has been awarded the ICPE 10-years Most Influential Paper Award.

The conference International Conference on Performance Engineering (ICPE), the premier gathering of practitioners and researchers interested in performance engineering, awarded the paper "Automatically Improve Software Architecture Models for Performance, Reliability, and Costs Using Evolutionary Algorithms" by Anne Koziolek (Martens), Heiko Koziolek, Steffen Becker and Ralf Reussner the ICPE 10-years Most Influential Paper Award.

Ralf Reussner gave an interview with the news portal heise online on the training of programmers and computer science education (in German).