Systems Development & Software Engineering Practices in the Digital Age

Systems development is a complex task that requires the management of many dependencies. In the digital age, software developers need to comprehend ever more complex environments, managing and responding to frequent changes as they move along. Different practices within the software engineering community exist that help developers manage and respond to such challenges.

This topic areas blends recent technological advances from the field of software engineering with novel empirical and theoretical findings from information systems research. Our research in this area covers studies of the behavioral and cognitive processes during development (e.g., how do people read and understand conceptual models? How does a team become agile? What is the effect of emotions during software development?) as well as solution-oriented research (e.g., how can we design a meta-knowledge repository? What are design principles for agile and user-centered software development?). Our objective is to help developers and their organizations to perform better when creating new digital technologies.

Master or bachelor thesis research in this area can involve empirical research (e.g., case studies, surveys, experiments), literature reviews, and design-oriented research. Topical areas are among others:

• Data-driven development
• Open source software
• Conceptual modeling
• Agile development