My first week as a PhD student

In this week, a lot happend. The first three days of the week I was introduced to Ericsson. There was a huge amount of material to look at, like process descriptions, organizational charts, products and so forth. Honestly, I don't think that I have really understood it yet as this is a complex organization :)

Additionally, there was a lot of practical stuff to solve. For instance, I had to sign the contract, get my badge and so on. This was quite hard because I did not have my social security number yet. If one does not have this number in Sweden, he basically does not exist in Sweden, cannot open bank accounts or sign binding contracts. However, I got my number on Thursday and now everything is moving forward smoothley.

We also had a few meetings. At the university, there was a meeting called Brown Bag Seminars. Actually, this is a lot of fun. Somebody from the group or a guest researcher presents his research in a relaxed atmosphare while the others have a light lunch. Thereafter, a discussion of the research takes place and people bounce ideas around. Some of the other PhD students were also at the universtiy when I did my master studies. One of them is Nina, she was a lecturer back then. We talked a little about our research as she is doing research at my company, too. As our topics seem to be well integrated, we thought about doing a paper together. I look forward to that and will further discuss it with her next week.

On friday, we had a very important meeting with the Streering Group of my PhD studies, consisting of me, my advisor and two people from Ericsson. The streering group will meet every four weeks to discuss what has been done, to give feedback, discuss new research ideas, and decide what to do in the next four weeks. This week we had some very interestind discussions which made me understand some of the problems the company is facing pretty well. Furthermore, some research ideas popped up and we were able to roughly define an initial overall goal of the research. We also planned an initial case study at the company which I will start to prepare now. I took minutes of the meeting and wrote down some research questions. Next week, I will distibute the notes to the steering group to see whether we have the same understanding of things. When this becomes more mature, I will also go into the topic of my area and write something about this.

To draw an overall conclusion of my wirst week: It was a lot of information to cover and a lot of prictical things to solve, but everybody is very supportive which made the first week of my studies very pleasent.

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.