Serbastian Hönel

The first doctoral student at Data Intensive Sciences and Applications is in place

Sebastian Hönel is the very first doctoral student connected to Linnaeus University Centre for Data Intensive Sciences and Applications (DISA). He is joining the DISA research area on Data-driven Software and Information Quality.

Sebastian's work will initially focus on how software development data, e.g. repositories on GitHub (a web service for software development projects), can be used to improve how we assess the worth and cost of software. Such information can be used to e.g. determine if it is worth it to improve the internal quality of the software product (i.e. the source code, software architecture etc) and even how much the worth will be. Sebastian's work will rely on a multitude of data sources available online and require expertise in both machine learning and data (software repository) mining.

Sebastian Hönel studied computer science at Bachelor level at Linnaeus University in 2011. Then he returned to Germany as an apprentice to complete his undergraduate studies within digital media at SAP Research. He stuck with SAP for about a year as a working student in their digital manufacturing group. One year later he returned to Linnaeus University to study the Master Programme in Software Technology.

– I did my degree project in partnership with Softwerk AB, where I continued to work for two and a half years. At Softwerk, I was able to get experience of a large number of technologies such as databases, various programming languages and distributed and parallel systems. Learning something new is what drives me and I'm keen to know more about software quality and architecture, pattern detection and data mining, says Sebastian.

Personally, Sebastian hopes to be able to make an impact either building on or contrary to existing methods and models that are concerned with software quality or assessment. His goal is to contribute in the form of a new approach using some new or improved/extended model. If Sebastian is able to significantly improve how we assign worth/cost to different possible versions of a software or a documentation, it may have a big effect on how we approach quality assessment. We would now be able to assign actual monetary values or costs to quality improvements or deterioration. It would also provide an additional cost function/goal for automatic changes to source code.