The Finnish Software Engineering Doctoral Research Network aims to improve doctoral education in software engineering in Finland, aligning it with real-world industry and societal needs, and promoting higher-level academic-industry collaboration.
The network is a join venture of 9 Finnish universities, including Aalto University, LUT University, Tampere University, University of Eastern Finland, University of Helsinki, University of Jyväskylä, University of Oulu, University of Turku, and Åbo Akademi University. It has received funding form the Ministry of Education and Culture to train 49 new doctoral researchers during the years 2024-2027.
The nework is uniquely positioned to advance doctoral education in software engineering in Finland. All nine software engineering units at Finnish universities are part of the consortium, collectively covering most major software engineering subfields: empirical software engineering; constructive software engineering; software architectures; software applications; programming languages; user interface programming; software security; software engineering for industrial systems and edge computing; software verification, validation, and testing methods; software processes; human-centric software engineering; requirements engineering; software-intensive business; software product management; and global software engineering.
We operate following the Finnish Acceleration of Scientific Talent (FAST) method. FAST aims at reducing graduation times to three years while maintaining high doctoral education standards, and to facilitate thesis work done in close collaboration with non-academic partners to support doctoral students’ needs outside of academia. The FAST method is based on agile development principles, elaborated during the past two decades of software engineering research and built on the collaborative research model with continuous technology transfer.
According to FAST, the doctoral education is divided into iterations, i.e., “sprints,” with a length of approximately three months each, comprising 12 sprints for a three-year doctoral program. Each sprint has a concrete theme and goal that can be adapted to each student. During a data collection sprint, a set of use cases from participating companies is selected, and a task force comprising company representatives and doctoral researchers and their supervisors is organized to work on each use case. However, in a paper sprint, doctoral researchers work on joint publications under participating professors’ supervision. Each sprint starts with a joint review and planning meeting, comprising a two-day face-to-face seminar. During this meeting, PhD researchers, supervisors, industrial representatives, and guest researchers reflect on the previous sprint and plan the work for the following three months.
