Guidelines

If you would like me to supervise you, please consider the following guidelines. You may also like to have a look at How to pursue a PhD at the Distributed Systems Group, Institute of Informations Systems, Vienna University of Technology.

While a practica can also sketch the scientific method in an online documentation, a thesis of course should elaborate on it in a much more detailed way as described below.

Field of Research

Please check the collection of some research topics I am currently interested/involved in. If you have experience/interest in the one or other area, you may draft and send me a proposal and we may discuss on a concrete subject for your work.

Subject

Define your subject, give an introduction to the topic, illustrate the problem and formulate and motivate your research question. Address the relevance of the problem, enumerate different requirements and position the goals for your work.

Results

Illustrate the (expected) outcome of your work: explain your approach, present your, e.g., software architecture and describe the components involved.

Evaluation

How do you/do you intend to evaluate your work? You can do a study on a realistic use case that demonstrates how your work helps to address various problems or questions. Possibly you want to undertake a performance test of a system you developed.

Compare your work to existing literature. What is the context of your/their work. What are you/they focusing on?

Resources

You can access various resources within a certain network (e.g., the TUNet). Thus, you may want to establish a VPN connection from home.

Search Engines

Publishers

Online Libraries

Communities, Consortiums, Groups, Organizations, Societies, Task Forces, Unions,…

Libraries

Checklists

Submission of Documents

  • Your abstract summarises your research by explaining the main
    arguments, topics and findings in a self-contained way.
  • Check the spelling and grammar!
  • Write out all numbers between one and twelve.
  • Write out abbreviation the first time you use them.
  • Your bibliography is complete and correct.
  • References to tables and figures are correct.
  • Text in figures is readable.
  • You have printed your document to PDF, embedded all fonts and
    successfully checked the layout of the file.

Submission of Software

  • All source code files contain headers with an Open Source License; preferably MIT or Apache.
  • Your classes and methods are well documented and you use a logging framework for describing and debugging your algorithms.
  • All artifacts have been committed to and can be retrieved from a repository.
  • A build can automatically be generated from command line (e.g., with ‘mvn package’).
  • You have written automated tests (and checked their coverage) (e.g., with ‘mvn test‘).
  • You have documented and described pre- and postconditions of your tests.
  • No configurations are hard-coded in your source code but can be set using, e.g., environment variables or property files.
  • You have done code reviews and eliminated all platform specific code (you use, e.g., java.io.File.separator in Java programs).
  • You have described your software architecture and components using UML diagrams.
  • You have written a user manual: how can your software be installed and consumed?
  • You have written a developer manual: how can your software be customized, extended by a plugin, etc.?
  • FreeMind – a mind-mapping software.
  • Planner – a project management tool.
  • LaTeX – the de facto standard for the communication and publication of scientific documents.
  • Zotero – a free Firefox extension: collect, manage, and cite your research sources.
  • JabRef – an open source bibliography reference manager.
  • Software Stencils – Visio Stencil and Template for UML
  • PDFCreator – creates PDFs from any Windows program. Use it like a printer.
  • create backups! – and/or make use of our repository.

TU Wien specific

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