Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences - Process Management and Information Systems

General Information

Our team offers bachelor and master thesis topics to be written in English. There are quarterly info sessions where we explain the process of writing a thesis with our team. Last info session took place on June 8th, 2022. Here you can find the slides and the recording of the session.

For the current topic list, see below. Furthermore, find here a summary of guidelines for working on your thesis with us.

Formatting

Please consider the following hints and guidelines for working on your thesis:

• The thesis has to be written using the \documentclass[preprint,review,12pt]{elsarticle} Latex template. You can use the overleaf template for writing your thesis.

• A bachelor thesis has a page limit of 40 pages of text (not including cover, table of content, references, appendices).

• A master thesis has a page limit of 80 pages of text (not including cover, table of content, references, appendices).

Prerequisites

The candidate is expected to be familiar with the general rules of writing a scientific paper. Some general references are helpful for framing any thesis, no matter which topic:

• Wil van der Aalst: How to Write Beautiful Process and Data Science Papers? Archive Report (2022).

• Jan Recker: Scientific Research in Information Systems: A Beginner's Guide . Springer, Heidelberg, Germany (2021).

• Jan Mendling, Benoit Depaire, Henrik Leopold: Theory and Practice of Algorithm Engineering . Archive Report (2021).

• Claes Wohlin, Pär Runeson, Martin Höst, Magnus Ohlsson, Björn Regnell, Anders Wesslén Experimentation in software engineering . Springer Science & Business Media (2012).

• Ken Peffers, Tuure Tuunanen, Marcus A. Rothenberger, Samir Chatterjee: A Design Science Research Methodology for Information Systems Research . J of Management Information Systems 24(3): 45-77 (2008).

• Barbara Kitchenham, Rialette Pretorius, David Budgen, Pearl Brereton, Mark Turner, Mahmood Niazi, Stephen G. Linkman: Systematic literature reviews in software engineering - A tertiary study . Information & Software Technology 52(8): 792-805 (2010).

• Lagendijk, Ad. Survival Guide for Scientists: Writing, Presentation, Email . Amsterdam University Press (2008).

• Adam LeBrocq: Journal of the Association for Information Systems Style Guide. http://aisel.aisnet.org/jais/JAIS_Style_Guide_2013.pdf

In agreement with the supervisor an individual list of expected readings should be studied by the student in preparation of the actual work on the thesis.

Grading

The grading of the thesis takes various criteria into account, relating both to the thesis as a product and the process of establishing its content. These include, but are not limited to:

• Correctness of spelling and grammar

• Aesthetic appeal of documents and figures

• Compliance with formal rules

• Appropriateness of thesis structure

• Coverage of relevant literature

• Appropriateness of research question and method

• Diligence of own research work

• Significance of research results

• Punctuality of work progress

• Proactiveness of handling research progress

Recent Topics

If you are interested in one of the following topics, please send an email expressing your interest to Prof. Dr. Jan Mendling. Please explain why this topic is interesting for you and how it fits your prior studies. Also explain what are your strengths in your studies and in which semester of your studies you are.

The next deadline is 15 June 2022 .

Topic 1: Visual Analytics of Waiting Times for Process Mining

Process mining is a family of analysis techniques that takes event sequence data as input and generates meaningful visual representations for analysts. So far, the analysis of waiting times has been limited in prior research. The goal of this thesis is to review contributions that explicitly show the timeline of event, identify opportunities for improvement and implement and evaluate a new visualization technique.

References:

• Aigner, W., Miksch, S., Schumann, H., & Tominski, C.: Visualization of time-oriented data. Springer Science & Business Media, 2011.
• van der Aalst, WMP: Process Mining , 2nd edition. Springer Verlag, 2016.

Topic 2: Process Science on Causal Event Graphs – the Logical Next Step

Nowadays, most process mining tools are concentrated on discovering process models and process performance indicators from event-log data by the means of common algorithms, mostly originated from the alpha algorithm. This helps analyst to gain insights into e.g., which paths the process takes, how many variants it has, how complex it is, or where the bottlenecks are located. Nevertheless, most of the time, those algorithms neglect the contextual data that is connected to its execution but has no obvious impact on it, even though it could be valuable for the root-cause detection of issues.
The goal of this thesis is to investigate a special kind of data structure which Waibel et al. call “Causal Event Graph” (stored in a Neo4j graph database) with the help of Jupyter Notebooks (will be provided on the Azure Cloud). The challenge of this thesis is to develop Python scripts that make use of common AI/ML libraries with the goal to detect patterns or cluster data in order to gain insights that go beyond “classical” process mining.

References:

• Vom Brocke, J., van der Aalst, W., Grisold, T., Kremser, W., Mendling, J., Pentland, B., Recker, J., Roeglinger, M., Rosemann, M. and Weber, B., 2021. Process Science: The Interdisciplinary Study of Continuous Change. Available at SSRN 3916817.
• Waibel, P., Pfahlsberger, L., Revoredo, K. and Mendling, J., 2022. Causal Process Mining from Relational Databases with Domain Knowledge. arXiv preprint arXiv:2202.08314.
• Van der Aalst, W.M., 2016. Process mining: data science in action. Springer.

Topic 3: Use of Business Process Models in Requirements Engineering

Business Process Models have been widely used in software development for requirement engineering activities. However, there is no study that presents an overview of how these models are used depending on the software development approach in which they are applied. The goal of this thesis is to conduct a systematic review of the literature, identify and compare how business process models are used for requirements engineering activities depending on the software development methodology applied (eg, agile or traditional approaches), as well as prioritize these uses depending on the methodology.

• Wagner, S., Fernández, DM, Felderer, M., Vetrò, A., Kalinowski, M., Wieringa, R., ... & Winkler, D. (2019). Status quo in requirements engineering: A theory and a global family of surveys. ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM), 28(2), 1-48.
• Cardoso, ECS, Almeida, JPA, & Guizzardi, G. (2009, September). Requirements engineering based on business process models: A case study. In 2009 13th Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Conference Workshops (pp. 320-327). IEEE.
• De la Vara González, JL, & Diaz, JS (2007, June). Business process-driven requirements engineering: a goal-based approach. In Proceedings of the 8th workshop on business process modeling (p. 15).

Topic 4: Uses of Models in Agile Software Development

Modeling is a key topic in software engineering. In software development projects, among other aspects, modeling supports the developer in understanding the design by providing an overview and a tool for communication with fellow developers and other stakeholders. The benefits of models for supporting system analysis and design activities have been highlighted regarding their cognitive effectiveness, often regarding traditional methodologies. However, these benefits have also been discussed in the agile scene, but it is still not clear to what extent models are used in agile software development projects. The thesis aims to conduct a systematic review of the literature to identify the status quo on the topic. The findings shall be evaluated according to the perspective of practitioners.

• Ambler, Scott W. The object primer: Agile model-driven development with UML 2.0. Cambridge University Press, 2004.
• Alfraihi, Hessa Abdulrahman A., and Kevin Charles Lano. "The integration of agile development and model driven development: A systematic literature review." The 5th International Confrence on Model-Driven Engineeing and Software Development (2017).
• Wagner, Stefan, Daniel Méndez Fernández, Michael Felderer, Antonio Vetrò, Marcos Kalinowski, Roel Wieringa, Dietmar Pfahl et al. "Status quo in requirements engineering: A theory and a global family of surveys." ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM) 28, no. 2 (2019): 1-48.
• Petre, Marian. "UML in practice." In 2013 35th international conference on software engineering (icse), pp. 722-731. IEEE, 2013.

Topic 5: A Study into the Practice of Logging in the Software Development Process

Logging is a crucial practice in software development as it facilitates the monitoring and resolution of problems that arise on runtime. While there is much research focusing on log analysis, the understanding of logging practices is still underdeveloped. Typical works have focused on improving logging by suggesting where and what to log. However, there are no clear guidelines on what the benefit are of logging at specific point in program and what is their contribution to the overall process improvement. The goal of this thesis is to review existing literature on logging practices and extract requirements for analyzing such logs from a process point of view.
References:

• H Li, W Shang, B Adams, M Sayagh, and AE Hassan, "A Qualitative Study of the Benefits and Costs of Logging From Developers' Perspectives," in IEEE Transactions on Software Engineering, vol. 47, no. 12, pp. 2858-2873, 1 Dec. 2021, doi: 10.1109/TSE.2020.2970422.
• He, Pinjia, et al. "Characterizing the natural language descriptions in software logging statements." Proceedings of the 33rd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Automated Software Engineering. 2018
• Yuan, Ding, Soyeon Park, and Yuanyuan Zhou. "Characterizing logging practices in open-source software." 2012 34th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE). IEEE, 2012.

Topic 6: Analyzing File Evolution Trends for Predicting Development Task Completion

Topic 7: Business Processes and Benchmarking

Benchmarking plays a very important role for many businesses. A key focus of benchmarking are business processes that are fairly standardized in different industries. One of the key challenges of benchmarking is to obtain benchmarking data for business processes that are not fully publicly visible. The objective of this thesis is to establish a theoretical perspective on how benchmarking can be applied, which data sources are available for business processes and corresponding performance indicators, and how innovative concepts for addressing the challenges of benchmarking can be developed.

• Aksu, Ü., & Reijers, HA (2020, October). How Business Process Benchmarks Enable Organizations To Improve Performance. In 2020 IEEE 24th International Enterprise Distributed Object Computing Conference (EDOC) (pp. 197-208). IEEE.