Bachelor and Master Theses

How do you react when your phone has new software updates? Annoyed? Frustrated? Happy? Indifferent? This project aims to explore the public perception of software maintenance, and aims to learn how we as software engineers can do a better job at providing the right type of information that people are interested in when software is updated. This thesis fits in the broader context of improving the public understanding of software and software engineering. Software maintenance tasks are crucial to keep deployed software relevant. However, maintenance comes with many risks, including downtime and introducing new bugs. 

In this thesis, you will do empirical research to understand the public perception of several aspects of software maintenance, with the goal of coming up with -and evaluating- improved ways to present software updates. 

The thesis topic is quite open and the student(s) taking the thesis are encouraged to bring their own ideas to limit the scope of the topic to a particular domain of interest (e.g. mobile apps, updates for cars, or other). Moreover, it is possible to focus on several different aspects of software maintenance, from focusing on communicating the nature and need for software maintenance, to looking aat specific improvements to software maintenance activities.

Good knowledge of Software Engineering and interest in doing empirical software engineering research.