My PhD studies in Sweden

During the PhD studies in Sweden, a PhD student completes course work as well as research work resulting in a PhD thesis. Thereby, a PhD is worth four years of full time study. In between, most PhD students finish a so called licentiate which is an intermediate degree. The licentiate is awarded after two years of full time study and results in a licentiate thesis. The theses (licentiate as well as PhD) include a set of papers published as well as an introduction which explains how the papers are interrelated and contribute to the overall research goal and research questions addressed during the studies.

My PhD studies will start on the 1st of October 2007. I will be an industrial PhD student, meaning that I spend most of my time in industry and will do research there. As an industrial PhD student at BTH one is employed partly by BTH and a company, in my case Ericsson.

The topic of my research will be how to predict the impact of changes in a software process on software productivity as well as how to generally improve productivity. This will help to evaluate different alternatives of possible changes against each other. Software productivity research seems to be a very broad area as one needs to understand how the different phases of the development process (e.g. requirements engineering and testing) interrelate which requires a good understanding of all these phases. Additionally, in order to predict the productivity means are necessary to measure productivity in a good way. I really look forward to going deeper into this interesting topic.