Research
Software systems keep failing, and projects run late or over budget. At the same time, decision makers often rely on personal experience or self-proclaimed “thought leaders” instead of empirical evidence. This is why the Software Engineering Group at Heidelberg University focuses on empirical software engineering. We study how software is built, derive actionable insights, develop tool prototypes and recommendations, and validate them in practice.
Our research focus is empirical software engineering, and in particular software analytics. We tackle problems rooted in software practitioners’ actual needs, which we identify systematically using empirical research methods. Our projects usually combine foundational and applied research and are published in leading software engineering venues.
Our main research areas are:
- Data-driven decision making in software engineering
- Developer experience and tool support
- Human-centric software engineering
- Mining software repositories
- Meta-scientific issues in software engineering research
- Behavioral studies of software developers
We process, analyze, and visualize software engineering data to monitor, govern, and improve software development processes and tools. We are further interested in interdisciplinary research and methodological aspects of empirical software engineering. Our vision is that software engineering becomes more evidence-based, which is only possible if academic researchers provide actionable insights on topics that are relevant to practitioners. You can find a list of our publications here.