TDDD89 Scientific Method

Seminar 3

Seminar 3

Purpose

To practice how to write a section on related work for your thesis plan, including summarizing scientific results that will be necessary to relate to during your thesis.

Preparations

Revise the introduction of your thesis plan according to the feedback you received at Seminar 2.

Based on your thesis topic, search for relevant literature and make sure to read at least four publications relevant to the topic and method you plan to employ as part of your thesis work. (Per team, not per person.)

Write a Related Work section of your thesis plan, and possibly a preceding Background section to describe the context of the work (recall the difference between Background and Related Work from Lecture 2). Make sure to properly use the references that you have read so far in the course, including specifically the ones that are relevant to your topic and method.

When writing about related work, you will need to summarize the results of the publications that you believe will be relevant to your work. As you read those references and write summaries of them, you may realize that your research questions are vague, or that the question seems uninteresting, or that you would really like to write about something else. That is rather to be expected, and the purpose of writing a tentative thesis plan is to start engaging with your topic and learn about it through reading and writing. The result of reading related work may be that you change the focus of your work.

The expected result is not a finished Background and Related Work (in the generic structure called Theory) chapter of a master's thesis. The most important part is to put your work in a scientific context using related work: publications that are recently published and relevant for your specific thesis work.

Even in the Background chapter, do not include overly general background material (such as concepts taught in mandatory courses at computer science bachelor level), or descriptions of technical systems that may not be material to understanding the specifics of your thesis issue.
Instead, introduce problem-specific central concepts, terms and notation that are important for someone with a general computer science and engineering background to be able to follow the rest of the thesis, including the discussion of related work.
Be not overly specific either. Aim at future generalizability of your formalization of the problem and its forthcoming solution.

For example, if you wish to study whether it would be economical to adopt the cross-platform mobile development framework PhoneGap for company X, you could start to write an introduction on company X's products, on Android vs. iOS specifics, and on how you write components in PhoneGap. However, this would not help the reader understand how you plan to conduct your study on the economics involved, or how you indeed define an economical choice. Instead, you should opt for introducing a formal ("theoretical") framework that extracts the core problem(s) to be solved, models it/them in a more abstract way (e.g., using weighted graphs, constraints or equations) and explains what costs and parameters are involved in making this choice, and how they can be evaluated. You could find literature on the total cost of IT systems, with models that include development, testing, and maintenance. Such models may to consider the cost of training staff to handle different codebases, or the cost of maintenance per line of code, or the estimated cost of upgrading software for new versions of platforms.

Submission of thesis plans

As a rule of thumb, expect to write about 2-3 additional pages plus references, so your working document should have about 5 pages plus references now.
Also, include as an appendix section a list of changes to your text, based on the feedback you have received thus far.

Share your revised and extended thesis plans on LISAM (Seminar3/group) by tuesday before the seminar, i.e., 28 november 2023.

Review of others' plans

Review (individually) the other thesis plans from your group once they are available on LISAM, before the seminar, and use the grading rubric as described below. Put your assessments of the other thesis plans in your group's Seminar3 folder in Lisam before the seminar.

Using the grading rubric

For each thesis plan that you review, assess the thesis plan by using the Grading Rubric (attributes Introduction, Theory (= Background + Related Work), Organization and Language, and Form).
Justify your assessment by referring to the course literature on how to write a thesis, as well as the papers that you read in preparation for Seminar 2.

To understand how to use the grading rubric, start by reading the description at the top row. For instance, the red row in the "Theory" column reads
"Peer-reviewed scientific references are lacking. The references only describe techniques to be used, not any theoretical framework for interpreting results or conducting a study".
This would correspond to the case above, when an author describes how to write an application using PhoneGap, but not how to assess the economics of cross-platform development.

The next row reads "Certain scientific sources exist, but they do not cover the areas necessary for the specific thesis work and are not carefully chosen (too specific to be of general use or vice versa) and are not formatted so that their origin and character become clear".
If, for example, the author has only made use of very general references that concern application development costs in general, or references to case studies of systems that are 30 years old, or used models that are not applicable to a small company developing applications that rely on third-party components to a large extent, then this description may apply. The references may also be formatted in such a way that important information is missing.

Your assessments of each other's thesis plans need to be available on LISAM at the seminar.

Reading material

• Four papers relevant to your Related Work sections.
• The Related Work sections of the thesis plans by the other students in your team.

The seminar

During the seminar, each group will go through each team's assessments of each thesis plan and compare them, with emphasis on the new Background and Related Work sections, and (where applicable) revised Introduction (see the list of changes in the thesis plan).
You must have the material that your assessments refer to available during the seminar.

As you discuss the grading rubric during the seminar, make sure to engage in a dialogue on how to improve the proposed thesis plan, given the information available thus far.

Whenever the group is unsure, take note of your question and ask the seminar leader when joining your group.

Take notes of all feedback on your thesis plan, and revise the thesis plan after the seminar.

Use the grading rubric as a reference point for discussions on how to improve the thesis plan.
Compare with the corresponding sections in the published thesis that you have read, as well as the other publications.

Finally, agree within the group who will read which material for items (A) and (B) in Seminar 4 so that you will have a balanced distribution of different sources to discuss in the next seminar.

Page responsible: Christoph Kessler
Last updated: 2023-11-20