Nominated for the Ernst-Denert-Award 2019

My dissertation was nominated for the Ernst-Denert Award for Software Engineering 2019. It is a bit late to talk about it, but I still want to present to you my experience with this exciting event. We had a great day with interesting talks of really great quality. But let me take you on a journey through the day, and the day before.

All nominees were invited to Schloss Dagstuhl to present their dissertation's topics in front of the jury. The way to Schloss Dagstuhl was an adventure on its own: it was a cold day. Being in favor of the German railway system, I decided to go by public transport. I had a nice ride to Mainz, the largest city nearby(ish), for taking the bus to Schloss Dagstuhl. Two buses, actually, because I had to change buses in Türkismühle. It was late in the evening, cold, and dark.

Waiting for the bus in Türkismühle, I had to stand in some kind of circular street. At the time when the bus should come, nothing came. Nothing, not any car at all. Some minutes later, a bus drove by. Not at my bus stop, but like 30 meters away, bypassing the circle. This was the second last bus of the day, so I was sure I needed to wait for another hour and find the correct bus stop. But wait! The bus... it came back. Now that never happened before. After I got on the bus (as the only passenger), the driver literally told me: "I always stop here, but there is never anybody at the bus stop. So today I thought I can just skip it. And there you are standing at the ever-lonely bus stop."

The bus driver was so kind to drive me even further than the last stop, so that I was closer to the venue, which I found very nice. After a walk to Schloss Dagstuhl I checked in and had a nice dinner with another nominee, that also came in late. As we were very late, we got the rest of the planned dinner, which was not only very good, but also very much. After a good night's sleep (however good you sleep before an award nomination talk) I got to meet the other nominees and the jury. We had a nice day, packed with very interesting and very good talks about some impressive PhD theses. Combined with the nice venue and perfect whether we had a great day.

Later on we learned that Johannes Späth of the University of Padeborn won the award with his talk about "Synchronized Pushdown Systems for Pointer and Data-Flow Analysis", which I personally find very appropriate. Congratulations! He did some great work there and I recommend to read his thesis. Being nominated for this award was an interesting experience and although I did not receive the award in the end, I am thankful to the award organizers from the Special Interest Group Software Technology of the German Informatics Society.

All nominees together wrote a book which summarize their work, with my contribution being [KG20]. It is available in open access, so feel free to look into it!

[KG20]
Marco Konersmann and Michael Goedicke. Same but Different: Consistently Developing and Evolving Software Architecture Models and their Implementation. In Michael Felderer, Wilhelm Hasselbring, Heiko Koziolek, Florian Matthes, Lutz Prechelt, Ralf Reussner, Bernhard Rumpe, and Ina Schaefer, editors, Ernst Denert Award for Software Engineering 2019 - Practice meets Foundations. Springer International Publishing, 2020. [ DOI | .pdf ]