Who are you and what do you do? Who are your partners?
As of 2009, I am a research associate at the Fraunhofer Institute for Experimental Software Engineering in Kaiserslautern where I am working on applied research and industrial consulting in the field of software architecture for information systems. At Software Campus I work together with Software AG and KIT in Karlsruhe.
How long have you been with Software Campus and why are you in the program?
Software Campus offers some valuable enrichments for my dissertation. Thanks to the cooperation with companies it is possible to understand practical requirements, to integrate them into my solutions and to evaluate them in a real development situation. With this I hope to extend the practical relevance and the value of my work. Moreover, the trainings for executive qualification, mentoring and the opportunity to establish contacts with representatives of the industry and other doctoral students are of course attractive aspects that I appreciate. I have been participating in the program since 2012.
What is it that fascinates you about computer science?
My interest in computer science started very early, as a child I borrowed the book “My First Basic Program” from the church library and taught myself how to do programming. Since then the fascination has not faded. How computer science today permeates, improves and facilitates all areas of our life, the speed at which innovations are created, the flexibility but also the challenges it offers. These are all aspects that make this discipline exceptional for me and the most interesting I can imagine.
What is the content of your IT project and how could it be used in the future?
Software architecture is the set of all basic decisions concerning a software system. Their documentation is the key to efficiently making them usable for those involved. In industrial projects we have often experienced that the software architecture documentation provided is not used by developers because it does not provide the optimal support for the concrete tasks.
The idea is therefore to fully automatically generate highly customized software architecture documentation for each individual developer in a development project, which contains exactly the right information for the respective task and context and communicates it in an optimal way. I hope to make implementation work and the process of software development more efficient and to achieve higher quality results.
In your opinion, what skills do top executives need to have in order to be successful today?
A top executive must have a vision and continuously lead his area of responsibility in this direction. He must be able to analyze and understand situations and make goal-oriented, creative and sustainable decisions based on them. He also needs the ability to work in a team and empathize, to understand his employees and to motivate and support them individually. But I also consider the ability to self-reflect, to question one’s own behavior and to accept criticism to be important qualities.
What’s your passion – besides your job and Software Campus?
I play computer games and so to some extent I am also faithful to computer science in my spare time. But I’m also passionate about good books and sophisticated films.
