Samstag, 29. September 2007

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.

3 Kommentare:

Sebastian hat gesagt…

Hej Kai,

as I already said in the post in my own blog, I wish you the very best for your PhD thesis. I'm convinced that you will manage this big task. I wish you enough energy and motivation to do this work the next 4 to 5 years! And please let us know how you are doing and what challenges you are facing through this blog!


Hej da,


Sebastian

Marwane hat gesagt…

Hi Kai,

I also wish you the very best for your PhD Thesis and hope for you and us all you'll come up with excellent results that'll make software engineering processes more efficient and easier understandable. I am looking forward to see what kind of work you'll do and the directions you'll evaluate.

Marwane

Unknown hat gesagt…

Hi Kai,

Good luck with your studies. At the moment I'm looking around in Holland to apply myself to the same problem: it's only plans yet. I majored in psychology, so my point of view would be the 'soft side'.

Sanne