The Software Construction Research Group (SWC) was dissolved upon the retirement of Prof. Dr. Horst Lichter on August 1, 2026.
The group was founded on March 1, 1998, as part of the Chair of Software Engineering. Here you find information about our past main activities (publications, teaching, and research projects), as well as about the people who made up the SWC.
As with any project, there is still some work to be completed on the “SWC” project. Therefore, we will continue to publish updates here regarding the research projects that are still in progress.
News
Paper accepted @ QuASoQ 2026
2 November 2026
Paper accepted @ ICSTE 2026
21 September 2026
Paper accepted @ PLoP 2026
26 August 2026
We are organizing the QuASoQ 2026 workshop
14 August 2026
Spotlights
Book "Student Thesis Projects"
7th edition available as print, ebook, and open access!
Proto-ML IDE
An IDE to support prototyping of ML solutions
Book "Software Engineering" (German)
4th edition available as print and ebook
QuASoQ
Workshop on Quantitative Approaches to Software Quality
Vorkurs Informatik
coffee4j
Our combinatorial test and fault characterization framework for Java
EAdebts
Interested in our enterprise architecture debts research?
SWC @ Youtube
Watch our videos!
Research areas
Software Architecture
Software Testing
Software Evolution
DevOps & Release Engineering
Recent publications
- Selin Coban, Patrick Chrestin, Horst Lichter (2026)
Knowledge Reuse in ML Prototyping: Insights from an Interview Study. In Tsuyoshi Nakajima (ed.) The Twelve International Conference on Advances and Trends in Software Engineering (SOFTENG 2026), Venice, Italy, May 24-28, IARIA Press, ISBN 978-1-68558-398-9, 1-8. PDF - Ada Slupczynski (2026)
A Modernization Decision Framework for Legacy Information Systems. In Francesca Zerbato, Jelena Zdravkovic, Luise Pufahl, Geert Poels, Marite Kirikova (eds.) Intelligent Information Systems CAiSE 2026, Verona, Italy, Jun 8-12, Springer Nature Switzerland, Cham, Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing, Vol. 587, ISBN 978-3-032-27997-2, 269-277.
DOI URL - Ada Slupczynski, Leila Mangonaux, Ilija Kovacevic, Michal Slupczynski, Stefan Decker, Horst Lichter (2026)
Collaborative Code Modernization with Local LLM Deployment and Evidence-Based Prompt Guidelines. In 21st International Conference on Evaluation of Novel Approaches to Software Engineering (ENASE 2026), Benidorm, Spain, May 22-24, SciTePress – Science and Technology Publications, Lda, Vol. 1, ISBN 978-989-758-828-0, 825-832.
DOI - Alex Mattukat, Horst Lichter (2026)
A Catalog of User Authentication Patterns. In Proceedings of 33rd Conference on Pattern Languages of Programs, People, and Practices, PLoP 2026 (to be published), October, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada. - Nils Wild (2026)
Interaction-based Integration Testing of Component-based Software Systems. PhD thesis, Shaker Verlag, Düren, Aachener Informatik-Berichte, Software Engineering, No. 64, ISBN 978-3-8191-0533-3, RWTH Aachen University. PDF