On May 13th, 2016, Gregor Grambow successfully defended his PhD thesis entitled

Context-aware Process Management for the Software Engineering Domain

at Ulm University, Germany. The DBIS team is pleased to congratulate Dr. Grambow on his successful PhD defense and wishes him all the best for his future career. Gregor’s PhD advisor and promotor was  Prof. Dr. Manfred Reichert (DBIS), and the PhD was done as a cooperative doctorate with Prof. Roy Oberhauser (pictured left) of the Aalen University of Applied Sciences as part of a research project Q-ADVICE within the IngenieurNachwuchs program sponsored by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF).

About the thesis:
Software development processes are used by the majority of software companies to ensure the quality and reproducibility of their development endeavors. Typically, these processes are abstractly defined with the help of process models. However, they still need to be interpreted by individuals and be manually executed, resulting in governance and compliance difficulties. The environment is sufficiently dynamic that unforeseen situations can occur due to various events, leading to potential aberrations and process governance issues. Furthermore, as process models are implemented manually without real automation support, they impose additional work for the executing humans. Their advantages often remain hidden as aligning the planned process with reality is cumbersome.

In response to these problems, this thesis contributes the Context-aware Process Management (CPM) framework. The latter enables holistic and automated support for software engineering projects and their processes. In particular, in provides concepts for extending process management technology to support software engineering process models in their entirety. Furthermore, CPM contributes an approach to integrate the enactment of the process models better with the real-world process by introducing a set of contextual extensions. Various events occurring in the course of the projects can be utilized to improve process support and activities outside the realm of the process models can be covered. That way, the continuously growing divide between the plan and reality that often occurs in software engineering projects can be avoided. Finally, the CPM framework comprises facilities to better connect the software engineering process with other important aspects and areas of software engineering projects. This includes automated process-oriented support for software quality management or software engineering knowledge management. The CPM framework has been validated by a prototypical implementation, various sophisticated scenarios, and its practical application at two software companies.

Members of the PhD committee:

• Prof. Dr. Uwe Schöning (Chairman)
• Prof. Dr. Manfred Reichert (Promotor and First Referee)
• Prof. Dr. Franz Schweiggert (Second Referee)
• Prof. Dr. Roy Oberhauser (External Referee)
• Prof. Dr. Helmuth Partsch (Core Committee Member)
• Prof. Dr. Peter Dadam (Core Committee Member)