Hasso-Plattner-Institut
Prof. Dr. h.c. mult. Hasso Plattner
 

Enterprise Software Engineering

Enterprise Software is designed to handle the multitude of tasks that need to be performed in organizations, such as a manufacturing business, a school, a small startup or a large hospital. Enterprise software is intended to solve organization-wide problems, rather than helping single departments, involving the display, manipulation, and persistence of large data volumes and the support of business processes with this data.

Due to the scale and the need for adaptation to different business domains and contexts, Enterprise Software Engineering poses unique challenges. Our research group investigates how enterprise software systems can be architected, built and managed and what this means for the development processes that software development teams can apply.

Group Leader: Dr. Ralf Teusner

Research Activities

Our scope involves research on (I) building composable Enterprise Resource Planning Systems and (II) the required development processes in teams that take advantage of Agile principles and Design Thinking aspects.

I Composable Enterprise Resource Planning Systems

Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems play a vital role for today’s enterprises by providing comprehensive standard solutions to support critical business processes. However, for start-ups and growing companies that depend on adaptability and flexibility, using a fully-fledged ERP system right from company formation is often not practical.

While ERP systems offer powerful components, these might hinder the company’s development due to complex procedures and the implemented standardized business processes are inflexible. A lacking integration with third-party software can lead to separate data silos and their respective challenges and system implementation requires deep technical knowledge which may require external support.

We argue that future ERP systems should enable young companies to build and support their growing business processes while maintaining a future-oriented data model that allows both the company and its processes to adapt to the evolving needs of an upcoming enterprise. Therefore, the project aims to analyze how a new ERP system could be implemented from scratch using current cloud-native computing techniques that allow the system to grow organically with its evolving business requirements. The focus is on providing a system to build custom processes and standardizing them afterward when a company grows, instead of customizing a comprehensive standard that comes with an extensive ERP system.

Current Projects:

  • Building Composable and Adaptive ERPs Based on the Requirements of Start-ups and Growing Companies
  • Building Composable and Adaptive ERPs with Cloud-native and Low-Code Development Methods

Contact: Tobias Wuttke, Lukas Böhme

II Development Processes for Enterprise Software Engineering

Building complex enterprise systems requires multiple collaborating teams of software engineers, designers, architects and other specialised roles. The way that these teams organize their work and their ways of cooperation influences the software that is being produced. Therefore, upholding and maintaining effective development processes within teams is critical. In this research we investigate the development processes of teams, both when employing and integrating Design Thinking and Lean Startup models as well as implementing process improvement steps using project data analysis.

Current Projects:

  • Integrating Design Thinking, Agile practices, and Lean Startup: The InnoDev Software Development Approach
  • Informing Agile Software Process Improvement Steps Through Project Data Analyses

Contact: Franziska DobrigkeitChristoph Matthies

Teaching

We offer a lecture on Scalable Software Engineering. For HPI master students we also provide a varity of master theses topics. 

Selected Publications

  • 1.
    Matthies, C., Dobrigkeit, F., Hesse, G.: Mining for Process Improvements: Analyzing Software Repositories in Agile Retrospectives In: IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering Workshops (ICSEW). pp. 189–190. ACM, New York, NY, USA (2020)