I supervise Master’s students working on applied research in software engineering, often connected to ongoing research initiatives and industry collaborations. Topics include hybrid agile collaboration, software delivery performance and software development productivity.
Monika Singh — Information Asymmetry in Hybrid Collaboration
Supervision: Martin Kropp and Fabian Affolter
Reducing Change Blindness through AI and Session Clusters
Master’s thesis · 2026 · Ongoing
This thesis investigates how Session Clusters can synchronize awareness among participants in hybrid meetings and how AI-generated summaries and assessments of change relevance can help team members identify important updates. User studies and simulated data are planned to evaluate reductions in change blindness and coordination effort, as well as trust in the AI-supported information.
Related research: aWall — Agile and Hybrid Collaboration
Change Blindness Reduction in Agile Hybrid Settings
Master’s semester project · 2026 · Completed
Building on the earlier design, this project implemented mechanisms in aWall to make unseen changes and inactive tasks more visible, including awareness tracking across devices. An empirical evaluation found improved situational awareness and faster identification of relevant project changes.
Informationvisualization in Hybrid Settings
Master’s semester project · 2025 · Completed
This project investigated information asymmetry in hybrid agile teams through interviews, a survey and user evaluations. It identified difficulties in recognizing updates to digital Kanban boards and developed a visualization concept evaluated through a Figma prototype. The recommended design combined unobtrusive indicators for unseen changes, recent activity and inactive tasks.
Janick Rüegger — Automated Software Delivery Metrics
Automated DORA Metrics: A Case Study
Master’s thesis · 2023 · Completed
Supervisor: Martin Kropp
This thesis investigated automated measurement of DORA metrics using existing DevOps tooling data. It developed an open-source backend and conducted an industrial case study involving 37 production systems. The findings highlighted differences in delivery performance between individual systems and the limitations of relying solely on team-level aggregates.
Conference publication: Fully Automated DORA Metrics Measurement for Continuous Improvement (ICSSP 2024).
Marc Sallin — Software Development Productivity and Performance Measurement
Supervisor: Martin Kropp
Software Development Waste Self-Reporting to Guide Productivity Improvement: A Methodological Study
Master’s thesis · 2021 · Completed
This thesis investigated how development teams could identify and quantify wasted effort to guide productivity improvement. It developed an empirical classification of software development waste and a self-reporting method, evaluated with developers at Swiss Post. The study found that daily reporting was important for accurate quantification and examined the relationship between reported waste and delivery performance.
Conference publication: Waste Self-Reporting for Software Development Productivity Improvement (XP 2023).
Measure Software Delivery Performance using the Four DevOps Metrics
Master’s semester project · 2021 · Completed
This project explored how the four key DevOps metrics could be measured automatically and whether such measurements were useful to development teams. It developed a prototype and evaluated it with a Scrum team at Swiss Post, providing evidence of the approach’s practical value for assessing software delivery performance.
Conference publication: Measuring Software Delivery Performance Using the Four Key Metrics of DevOps (XP 2021).
Related: Research Projects · Publications · Teaching