Lutz Prechelt's Homepage
I am professor of Informatics and head of the
software engineering research group (AG SE).
Freie Universität Berlin
Institut für Informatik
Lutz Prechelt
Takustr. 9 (How to get there)
14195 Berlin
Germany
Room 014
Phone: +49 / 30 / 838-75115
Email:
prechelt@inf.fu-berlin.de
Mastodon:
@prechelt@hachyderm.io
Twitter:
@prechelt
XING page /
LinkedIn page
Secretary:
GesineMilde
ORCID Id 0000-0001-5592-3521
- Office hour / Sprechstunde
- To fix a date for oral examinations, please turn to my secretary.
- Oral exams for Bachelor/Master entail the material of one course and take 20 minutes.
- For courses with written exams (Klausur), oral exams are an option only if you have failed the Klausur or are unable to attend the Klausur. Prior consultation with me is required.
- I am the local representative of the German Informatics Society (Gesellschaft für Informatik e.V. (GI)) / GI-Botschafter. Feel free to ask about GI.
- Teaching of my working group: Course information
- General StudentInfo
Short vita
I was born in
Bielefeld
in
1965.
I received the degree of Diplom-Informatiker (~M.Sc.) from
Universität Karlsruhe (now Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, KIT)
in
1990
with a
thesis on parsing German sentences.
I stayed there at the
Institut für Programmstrukturen und Datenorganisation and got my Ph.D.
in
1995
with a
thesis revolving around
constructive neural network learning algorithms and
compiler construction for parallel computers.
When I received an offer to found a
research group on empirical software engineering, I decided to stay further. That work led to my
Habilitation
in
2000
based on a book on
empirical methodology in software engineering.
At that point I decided I needed to learn something else entirely and
I applied for a job in industry.
In April 2000, I joined
abaXX Technology (later merged into
Cordys, later merged into
Crealogix),
where I held various positions as a department head
(Quality Assurance, Training, Process Management, Technical Documentation)
and eventually became Chief Technology Officer.
I left abaXX in July 2003 to become full professor at
Freie Universität Berlin.
Research interests and past work
I started my research career in
artificial intelligence
(first
natural language processing YAKR],
then
neural network learning algorithms
Prune,
Stopping,
CasCor])
and then extended it into
compiler construction Cupit,
reapar] in
the realm of
parallel computing.
I have left all of these fields today.
I early became interested in
research methodology and
research quality.
This first led me to create a benchmark collection
called
Proben1 for neural network learning algorithms in 1994
Proben1,
NNbench],
which still appears to be
somewhat popular.
The same year, I participated in an assessment of the amount of
empirical evaluation performed in the software engineering literature
Expeval]
and performed an analogous one for articles about neural network
learning methods
NNeval].
I then switched the research area and eventually wrote
a methods book on controlled experimentation in software engineering
(which I was silly enough to publish in German) in 2000
experiments].
More work related to research methods and research quality will follow.
In 1995, I switched my field of research to
empirical software engineering
and performed
controlled experiments on a number of topics:
type-checking
tcheck],
inheritance depth
Inherit],
design pattern use
PatMain],
design pattern documentation
PatDoc],
and the Personal Software Process
pspe].
(Except for the one on inheritance depth, all of these experiments
were the first of their kind.)
I am also quite open to taking
opportunities when they present themselves.
Over the years, this has led to a number of interesting studies
regarding for instance
design pattern recovery
PAT],
plagiarism detection
jplag],
and melody recognition
Tuneserver].
When starting afresh after my stint in industry,
I shifted to a much more
qualitative research approach,
because, as you might have guessed by now, I like exploratory work
and quantitative methods have a dubious cost/benefit ratio
for such purposes.
Most of my group's work is now qualitative and revolves around
Agile processes and in particular
Pair Programming.
However, some quantitative work is also left and concerns
comparing development platforms.
See
ResearchHome for some more information on current work and my
personal bibliography or our
workgroup bibliography
for publications.
Software
- Review Quality Collector (RQC)
- sedrila: Tool infrastructure for building and running 'self-driven lab' courses
- pomalevi: Powerpoint-based maintainable lecture videos tool
- Saros: Distributed Party Programming
- a.nwesen.de: CoViD-19 contact tracing for universities
- argparse-subcommand: A small library to extend Python's 'argparse' stdlib with easy and uniform handling of subcommands
- unread-decorator: A tiny Python library for un-reading lines back into a file or un-nexting items back into an iterator
Honorary administrative and scientific service
Administrative:
Scientific:
Scientific consulting
I offer consulting (Beratung) and appraisals (Gutachten) in the following topic areas:
- all areas of the software process: software process models, software process management, software process improvement, software development methods and methodology
- empirical software engineering studies and their methodology
- human factors in software development
- software architecture and design