2 PhD positions in Software Engineering

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label Burse autorenew 2025-09-29, 17:01 history_edu Catan Andreea Corina
The department is strongly international, with approximately 80 faculty and 70 PhD students from 30 countries. The department is a fully integrated department with University of Gothenburg and Chalmers University of Technology as principals.

The positions are placed in the Software Engineering (SE) division at the department, with University of Gothenburg as the employer. Within the SE division, research ranges from software architecture, requirements, process improvement and change management, human factors, model-driven software development, agile processes, to verification and validation.

Software Engineering is a strategic area at the department and activities in the field are envisaged to grow further. To this end, the Software Engineering division was founded in 2010 by University of Gothenburg and Chalmers University of Technology in a joint venture. In 2011, the Software Research Centre was established in close collaboration with industrial partners, which presents excellent opportunities to conduct research with industry. The division actively collaborates with industrial partners from the automotive and telecommunications domain.

Job assignments



Job Description for PhD Student Position 1:
This project aims to develop techniques for automatically updating UML models based on progressing source code. A typical situation in software development projects is that a UML design of the systems is made in the early phase of the project. Once the project moves into later phases, emphasis of the developers shifts from designing to the source code.

Changes are then only applied to the source code and the UML model becomes increasingly outdated. However, there are several occasions when an up-to-date model is valuable: for maintenance engineers, for testers and for engineerings joining a project at a later stage. The approach: a test set of UML models and source code is available. The project consists of: (1) Developing techniques for selecting which parts of the changes to the source code should be used to update the UML model. These may be statistics-based learning techniques, summarization techniques, feature-identification or other problem-specific approaches. (2) Implementing tooling to show and validate the approach, ideally working with industrial case studies.

Job Description for PhD Student Position 2:

This project aims to develop a new approach for software composition. The novelty of this composition model is that it is aims to separate concerns related to technical composition, functionality (semantics) and interaction style in different interfaces. The feasibility of this approach will be demonstrated by developing a component model that will enable user-driven composition of webpages (somewhat similar to internet mash-ups).

For both positions

The majority of the PhD students' working time is devoted to own research studies. A PhD student is also expected to develop own ideas and communicate scientific results orally as well as in written form. In addition, the positions will normally include 20 procent departmental work, mostly teaching duties. Staying abroad for a 3-6 month visit at a collaborating foreign University is possible. The employments are limited to a maximum of five years.