Elmar and I presented at TUM today how to write a great master’s thesis.
The slides are available here.
If you have feedback, still open questions, or your own experiences that you would like to share with us, we are happy to hear from you (in the comments or via mail)!
Elmar and I presented at TUM today how to do a guided research.
The slides are available here.
This was our first talk about guided researches, so if you have feedback or still open questions, we are happy to hear from you (in the comments or via mail)!
This post is from Roman Haas (he was advised by Elmar in his Bachelor’s Thesis).
It focuses on more or less typical problems that appeared to him and his friends during our theses and how to avoid them. They are described by anti-patterns, i.e. there is always a description of a problem and a possible solution for it. The problems are sorted by the moment when you should pay attention to them: the first ones may appear at the beginning of your work, the latter ones appear during your work or at the end.
Continue reading “Avoiding Typical Pitfalls (not only) at TUM”
This post is from Roman Haas (he was advised by Elmar in his Bachelor’s Thesis).
I presented my paper about “Deriving Extract Method Refactoring Suggestions for Long Methods” which I extracted from my bachelor’s thesis as part of the Software Quality Days 2016 conference. This post describes how I ended up at the Software Quality Days, how I prepared my presentation, what I didn’t know about conferences so far, and what I want to do differently in my next presentation.
Continue reading “From Thesis to Paper: My First Publication on a Scientific Conference”
Most good empirical software engineering papers that contain a study follow the same structure for its presentation. As far as I know, this structure was not invented by a single researcher, but developed gradually over the course of many publications.
Professional readers expect your case study to follow this structure, too. The audience that really matters for your publication—your thesis supervisor, his PhD advisor or program committee members—all are professional readers.
The goal of this article is to describe this structure: the basic building blocks of thesis chapters or paper sections that make up case study presentations. Continue reading “How to Write a Case Study”
A new set of presentation slides is like a program that has never been executed. It probably contains bugs. It reduces the pain for all stakeholders, and most importantly yours, if you test it to discover (and fix) its bugs before exposing it to its audience.
My test process for presentations has three steps. Continue reading “How to Rehearse Your Thesis Presentation”
As part of my roles as a PhD student, thesis supervisor and post-doc, I have literally listened to more than five hundred presentations. Unfortunately, many were very bad, making them an uncomfortable experience for both the presenter and the audience.
Over the years, I have made it a habit of asking speakers (both of good and bad presentations) whether they did a presentation rehearsal. Almost all good ones did. Without exceptions, all bad ones did not. From my experience, preparation in general and rehearsal in particular, are the most important factors influencing thesis presentation quality.
Intriguingly, this observation holds independent of whether the content is from a Bachelor’s, Master’s or PhD thesis. Rehearsal thus matters more than previous presentation experience.
This observation has been made by many others before me [1]. Then why have many, if not most of the presentations I have attended obviously not been rehearsed?
Continue reading “How You Can Predict If Your Presentation Will Suck”
When I listen to a thesis presentation, I need to get the big picture before I care about the details. Until I have understood the problem statement, for example, I do not care how an algorithm works or how its average-case amortized runtime complexity beats existing solutions. Not even if it is presented with a nifty visualization.
In other words, if the big picture of a presentation—its structure—is messed up, no amout of clever visuals can save it. The first priority is thus to get the presentation structure right.
The outline is the architecture of your thesis. It decomposes your document into components (called chapters) with dependencies between them (called references). As for software, the architecture plays a crucial role for the success of your project.
Since text is hard to refactor (much harder than source code), it is tedious manual work to fix an outline that does not work properly later. Minimize this risk by 1) using a standard architecture and 2) early validation of a prototype (through supervisor feedback). Continue reading “Thesis Architecture”
At TUM, topics for available thesis projects are advertised on faculty web pages. I expect the situation to be similar in other universities.
I refer to the collection of open thesis topics as the thesis topic market. The topics on the web pages are its visible part. However, there is also a hidden topic market that contains topics that are available but never get advertised. Continue reading “Cracking the Hidden Thesis Topic Market”
Thesis Guide 