Master's Thesis Projects

Open Thesis Projects

I offer a number of open Master's Thesis projects in the following research areas.

Spreadsheet Analysis

Spreadsheets are used extensively in business for all sorts of tasks and purposes and often for business-critical applications. They are end-user programs that underly similar rules as traditional software systems. While the quality of software is checked more rigorously this is not true for spreadsheets, especially with respect to maintainability. Thesis projects comprise the investigation of metrics to measure the complexity of spreadsheets and their risk of failure, as well as visualization techniques to allow spreadsheet users to better understand complex spreadsheets. The thesis projects will also offer a collaboration with the TU Delft startup Infotron B.V..

Mining Software Repositories and Software Evolution Analysis

Software repositories, e.g., versioning systems and bug repositories, keep track of issues and changes in a software project. They provide a wealth of information from which we can learn a number of general and project specific best practices to better develop and maintain software. Thesis projects comprise the investigation and adaptation of different data mining and machine learning techniques to train models and algorithms on data obtained from software repositories.

Program Understanding and Software Visualization

Program understanding still accounts for more than 50% of software developing costs. Software visualization techniques are a means to lower that by relying on the visual capabilities of humans. Our recent results in this research area have led to DA4Java, a tool to visualize, browse, and navigate object-oriented source code. Thesis projects comprise various extensions of our visualization technique, as well as, the inclusion of new data sources that can be leveraged to improve program understanding.

Master's Thesis Projects @ Companies

One of the missions of SERG is the transfer of research results to industry. For that, SERG maintains collaborations with a number of industrial partners. In context of these collaborations, a number of Master's Thesis projects are available:

• Software evolution related assignments @ Cannibal Game Studios. See also this document
• Software quality analysis @ Software Improvement Group (SIG)
• Software architecture knowledgebase @ Sogeti. See also this document

Interested? Do not hesitate to contact Martin Pinzger for more information.

Current Thesis Supervision

• Paulius Raila, Investigating the impact of code smells on the internal quality of software systems (together with Daniele Romano)
• Jelle Fresen, Visualization of State-Flow Graphs of AJAX Based Web Applications
• René Pingen, Impact Assessment of Anti-Patterns (together with Daniele Romano)
• Nigel Karsidi, Software Evolution and Software Product Lines
• Marco Krikke, Using Stack Traces in Bug Reports to Assess Bug Priority and Assign Developers
• Didier Liauw, Linking Architecture and Implementation with Web2.0 Technologies

Finished Master's Thesis Projects

• Mathieu Brüning, Native Cross-platform Mobile Application Development Using Voind, finished January 2012
• Niels Cobben, Visualizing the Local Neighborhood for Supporting Debugging with DA4Java, finished November 2011
• Simon Sabelis, Re-Engineering Web-Applications to Single Sign-On, finished August 2011
• Ruben Wieman, Anti-Pattern Scanner: An Approach to Detect Anti-Patterns and Design Violations, finished May 2011
• Andre Cunha, An Empirical Investigation of Source Code Metrics and FindBugs Warnings, finished July 2010

Thesis Committees

• Martijn van Egdom, Delft’s history revisited: Semantic Web applications in the cultural heritage domain, February 2012
• Kristian Slabbekoorn, Domain-aware Ontology Matching on the Semantic Web, January 2012
• Paolo Luigi Schipani, End User Involvement in Exploratory Test Automation for Web Applications, December 2011
• Nami Nasserazad, A Case Study in DSL Re-targetability, September 2011
• Bas van Nuland, A Service Oriented Architecture Solution for Simulating Gaming Suites, May 2011
• Stefan Lenselink, Concurrent Multi-browser Crawling of Ajax-based Web Applications, December 2010
• Bas Schoenmakers, September 2010
• Bas Wenneker, BibMix: Enrichment of Citation Metadata Based on Integration of Bibliographic Data, September 2010
• Niels Bouwers, A Java Compatible Virtual Machine for Wireless Sensor Networks, May 2009
• Cor-Paul Bezemer, Automated Security Testing of AJAX Web Widget Interactions, March 2009