In the fall 2015 we are starting a brand new project that we titled Persistent Code Reviewing, funded by NWO. If you’re into code reviews, software quality, or software testing, please consider applying for a position as PhD student or Postdoc within this project.

To quote the abstract of the project proposal:

Code review is the manual assessment of source code by human reviewers. It is mainly intended to identify defects and quality problems in code changes before deployment in production. Code review is widely recommended: Several studies have shown that it supports software quality and reliability crucially. Properly doing code reviews requires expensive developer time and zeal, for each and every reviewed change.

The goal of “Persistent Code Reviews” project is to make the efforts and knowledge that reviewers put in a code review available outside the code change context to which they are directed.

Naturally, given my long term interest in software testing, we will include any test activities (test design and execution, test adequacy considerations) that affect the reviewing process in our analysis.

The project is funded by the Top Programme of NWO, the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research.

Within the project, we have openings for two PhD students and one postdoctoral researcher. The research will be conducted at the Software Engineering Research Group (SERG) of Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands. At SERG, you will be working in a team of around 25 researchers, including 6 full time faculty members.

In this project you will be supervised by Alberto Bacchelli and myself. To learn more about any of these positions, please contact one of us.

Requirements for all positions include:

• Being a team player;
• Strong writing and presentation skills;
• Being hungry for new knowledge in software engineering;
• Ability to develop prototype research tools;
• Interest in bringing program analysis, testing, and human aspects of software engineering together.

To apply, please send us an application letter, a CV, and (pointers) to written material (e.g. a term paper or an MSc thesis for applicants for the PhD positions, and published papers or the PhD thesis for the postdoc).

We are in the process of further distributing this announcement: Final decisions on the appointments will be made end of October.

We look forward to receiving your application as soon as possible.