Tilo Linz is CEO and co-founder of imbus AG, a leading solution provider for software testing and has been active in the field of software quality assurance for more than 30 years. He helped establish the ASQF in Franconia. As founder and first chairman of the German Testing Board e.V. and founding member and long-standing president of the International Software Testing Qualifications Board (ISTQB), he has been instrumental in shaping and advancing software quality education and training at national and international level.

Prof. Dr.-Ing. Andreas Spillner has been active in the field of software development and testing in practice and research for over 40 years. He taught and researched software engineering at Bremen University of Applied Sciences until March 2017. Prof. Dr.-Ing. Spillner is a founding member of the German Testing Board e.V. and was the founder and long-standing spokesperson of the GI’s Test, Analysis and Verification of Software section and is currently involved in the ASQF Executive Committee. Within the GTB, he initiated the cooperation with universities and helped launch the survey on “Software testing in practice and research”.

Prof. Dr.-Ing. Ina Schieferdecker has been committed to advancing the topic of software quality in research and teaching as well as in transfer projects with companies and in social discussions for many years. She has been involved in the specification, modeling, simulation and verification of software-based networked systems and, in particular, the systematic testing of these systems since her doctorate. In the 1990s, she made significant contributions to performance and safety testing as well as to the further development of the specification language Testing and Test Control Notation (TTCN-3) and initiated the UML Testing Profile (UTP). In education and training, she has made significant contributions to various curricula, in particular to the Test Automation Engineer and the Quality Engineer for the IoT. Her contributions are also highly recognized in the international community. With her expertise, she has been appointed to various committees for shaping digitalization. She was one of the initiators of the Weizenbaum Institute in Berlin with the aim of advancing research for a networked society. She is currently contributing her perspective on the quality of systems to the development of digitalization strategies at the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF). Detailed information on the diverse activities of Prof. Dr.-Ing. Ina Schieferdecker can be found on her homepage: www.schieferdecker-online.info.

Prof. Dr. Bernd Hindel received the German Award for Software Quality in 2016 for his life’s work. As a promoter of software quality, he has been instrumental in initiating, promoting and shaping the topic both in Germany and internationally.

Then as now, internationally standardized training and further education in the IT industry is of the utmost importance. Bernd Hindel laid the foundations for this in German-speaking countries. For example, the Certified Tester in German-speaking countries has its origins in the ASQF, which was founded in 1996 at the instigation of Bernd Hindel.

In the area of quality assurance, Bernd Hindel is involved in committees related to standardization. He is a co-founder and former president of iNTACS e.V. (International Assessor Certification Scheme for SPICE assessors) and a member of the iNTACS Advisory Board. From 2007 to 2009, Bernd Hindel was active as a member of the DIN Institute Chairman for Software and Systems Engineering Standards and in this role represented Germany at ISO/IEC JTC1 SC7. During this time, he was also the German representative in the ISO working group for the definition of SPICE.

As a lecturer in software engineering and project management, Bernd Hindel passes on his knowledge at the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. He also teaches as a guest lecturer at the Universities of Augsburg and Würzburg and at Volkswagen AG’s AutoUni. He is also the author of numerous articles and books on the subject of software engineering.

Since 2001, Bernd Hindel has been Chairman of the Management Board of the Method Park Group, which he founded in the same year. He is also keynote speaker and program committee chairman at several international conferences on software quality, such as the World Congress on Software Quality.

Dr. Walter Wintersteiger was awarded the “German Prize for Software Quality” for his life’s work at the ASQF lighthouse event “3rd Testing Day Franken”. He is a true pioneer, trailblazer, ambassador and activist for software quality. Since the early 1980s, the dedicated activist with a doctorate in business administration has motivated the scene in the German-speaking D-A-CH region to work systematically on software quality.

“Through dedication, commitment and enthusiasm, he has networked the software quality communities beyond the German-speaking world,” said Stephan Goericke during his laudatory speech. Dr. Walter Wintersteiger has been working as an independent management consultant since 1986. In the early 1990s, he was one of the first certification auditors for ISO 9001 with a specific background in software quality management. He was Austria’s delegate in the EOQ SW Group (European Organization for Quality) and World Conferences for Software Quality (WCSQ), organizer of the 6th European Conference on Software Quality in Vienna (EOQ) and member of the program committee of the 3rd WCSQ in Munich.

Walter Wintersteiger was one of the founders of STEV (the Austrian Association for Software Quality Management), which was established in 1984, and from 1986 was the organizer and chair of the STEV conference “Software Quality Management in Practice” – one of the first and longest-running annual conferences on software quality in the German-speaking world. Today he is Honorary President of STEV.

In the course of his work, he has made a name for himself as a consultant and trainer, as a lecturer at universities and technical colleges, as an international seminar speaker and conference chair, as an auditor for certification organizations and as the author of numerous relevant publications. His mission has always been to make seemingly complicated things simple and understandable.

Rudolf van Megen, founder of SQS Software Quality Systems AG, was honored by ASQF e.V. for his life’s work on August 24, 2012. Over the past 30 years, Mr. van Megen has been a competent contact person at SQS for the areas of strategy, marketing and management and has managed to lead the SQS Group to become the global market leader in the field of “Independent Testing and Quality Management”. In his function as Vice President and member of the advisory board of ASQF e.V., as well as business ambassador for the city of Cologne, he has also made a special contribution to raising public awareness of software quality and securing the quality advantage in international competition. With his knowledge, thinking and diligence, he has positively influenced and inspired subsequent generations.

For this reason, Mr. van Megen was honoured with the special prize of the “German Award for Software Quality” for his life’s work. This special prize is sponsored by the ASQF.

The ASQF thanks Mr. van Megen for his extraordinary achievements in the fields of software security and quality and wishes him all the best for the future!

Born in Gulfport, Mississippi, USA in 1940, Sneed graduated from the University of Maryland in 1969 with a Masters Degree in Public Administration and Information Sciences.

Since the end of the 1970s, Harry Sneed has established the first commercial software testing laboratory and published the standard work “Software Quality Assurance” in 1980. Two years later, Harry Sneed organized the first scientific conference on software quality assurance. By the end of the last century, Harry Sneed had held more than 100 public seminars on software testing and software quality assurance, training more than 1200 future testers.

Harry Sneed has taught software testing at the universities of Koblenz and Szeged, among others, and has been teaching software engineering at the University of Regensburg since 2000.

Christian Brosch was honored with the ASQF Sponsorship Award at the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg. His thesis entitled “Supporting asynchronous clients in byzantine fault-tolerant systems” showed the profound knowledge and commitment he has put into this topic.

The sponsorship prize in the winter semester 2022/2023 was awarded to Henriette Hofmeier with her thesis “Dynamic Reconfiguration of Hardware-Vulnerability Mitigations in the Linux Kernel” at the graduation ceremony of the Faculty of Engineering at FAU.

As part of the virtual graduation ceremony of the Faculty of Engineering at FAU, Felix Quast was honored for his thesis “Testing Microservice Integration with Consumer-Driven Contract Tests”.

As part of the virtual graduation ceremony of the Faculty of Engineering at FAU, two awards for outstanding theses were presented on February 4.

Maike Raphael received the ASQF Sponsorship Award for her Master’s thesis “Smartphone privacy – (How) Is this possible?” the ASQF sponsorship award.

Jonas Röckl was also awarded the ASQF prize for his master’s thesis “Utilizing Virtualization Techniques for Advanced System Resiliency and Recoverability of Embedded Platforms”.

On July 29, 2021, two outstanding Master’s theses were awarded the prestigious ASQF Sponsorship Prize at a festive, virtual award ceremony at Nuremberg Tech.

Mathias Heindel received the ASQF sponsorship award for his Master’s thesis “Development and evaluation of options for resolving boot flash size limitation in x86-based systems”.

“Maritime situation recognition using dynamic Bayesian networks” was the title of Steffen Haaga’s thesis, which was also awarded the ASQF sponsorship prize.

In July 2021, the ASQF Sponsorship Award was presented for the second time at the Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg. The winner is Martin Sträßer with his thesis “Predicting Performance Degradations of Microservice Applications”.

In the winter semester 2020/2021, Daniel Ziegler was awarded the ASQF Sponsorship Prize at FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg for his work “Modeling, simulation and analysis of biodiversity measuring stations”.

Two sponsorship awards were presented at Nuremberg Tech in winter 2020.

Christoph Schüßler received the ASQF Sponsorship Award for his work on “Development of an optically powered sensor system for evaluating a strain gauge”.

Christian Vogt was awarded the sponsorship prize for his thesis “Analysis and visualization of innovative usability concepts to better support app developers on the cloud-based IoT platform MindSphere”.

The Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg has once again awarded the sponsorship prize. The winner was Markus Straußberger and the prize was sponsored by Konzept Informationssysteme GmbH. The award was presented by Norbert Kastner, Vice President of ASQF e.V. and Ralf Vogel from Konzept Informationssysteme GmbH.

In his master’s thesis “Android Software Protection using Virtualization-based Obfuscation”, which was supervised by Anatoli Kalysch and Dr.-Ing. Tilo Müller, head of the “Systems Security and Software Protection” working group at the Chair of Computer Science 1, Markus Straußberger created a new method based on the principles of virtualization to protect Android apps. Critical parts of the software can be extracted and executed in an individualized but automated virtual machine. This significantly increases the amount of analysis required to understand the internal logic of the app.
The independent and careful way of working and the outstanding technical realization of the work, with which Markus Straußberger makes a “valuable contribution to the protection of high-quality software”, were particularly praised.

Andreas Dirr’s thesis in the part-time Software Engineering and Information Technology course (WM-SE) on the topic “Conceptualization and prototypical realization of a monitor platform for middleware connection” was also awarded the ASQF sponsorship prize, donated by iSystIntelligente Systeme GmbH, .

Mr. Dirr completed his thesis at Airbus Defence and Space in Ulm, where it was embedded in the company’s overall software development practice. Both the supervisor Prof. Dr. Hans-Georg Hopf and the sponsor of the award, Daniel Heinrich (iSyst), praised Andreas Dirr for the first thesis with an ASQF sponsorship award that was written during a part-time course of study. Prof. Dr. Hopf particularly emphasized Andreas Dirr’s high level of commitment and good performance. Daniel Heinrich was also pleased that the award winner’s work on middleware systems had struck a chord with the times, which is also an integral part of the company’s own test systems.

Helmut Engelhardt’s master’s thesis “Evaluation of registration algorithms based on deep learning” at Nuremberg Institute of Technology was praised by his supervisor Prof. Dr. Stefan May and the sponsor Ralf Vogel (Konzept IS). Helmut Engelhardt’s work dealt with current findings in the field of deep learning; he carried out an evaluation in which he demonstrated the feasibility of mapping robust registration methods with neural networks.

According to Prof. Dr. May, this work is “one of the best final theses of the Laboratory for Mobile Robotics since its foundation.” Helmut Engelhardt’s involvement in the RoboCup team AutonOHM was also highlighted, with which 1st place was achieved at the 2017 World Championships in Nagoya and 2018 in Montreal.

At the graduation ceremony of the Faculty of Engineering at FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg, Georg-Daniel Schwarz was awarded the ASQF Sponsorship Prize for his Master’s thesis.
The ASQF awards the ASQF Sponsorship Prize, which is endowed with 500 euros, for particularly good performance during the course of study, a short duration of study and a thesis that takes particular account of practical relevance and software quality aspects.

The prize in the 2019 summer semester at FAU was awarded by the develop group sponsored. The develop group stands for the professional development of individual, customized software systems. The develop group was represented at the graduation ceremony by Bernhard Schmid, Head of HR Marketing and Recruiting. Anna-Christina Feldhusen represented the ASQF in Erlangen as office manager. Both congratulated Georg-Daniel Schwarz on his excellent thesis and on receiving the sponsorship award.

In his thesis “Migration the JValue ODS to Microservices”, which was awarded a grade of 1.0, Schwarz completed a challenging task of the highest quality with social relevance. The thesis was supervised by Andreas Bauer, M.Sc. and Prof. Dr. Dirk Riehle (Chair of Open Source Software).

The JValue Open Data Service (ODS, http://jvalue.org) enables users to easily consume open data while defining a high quality of service. Consumption is achieved through a standardized access interface to a wide variety of data sources. In its first version, the ODS served individual applications, in particular PegelAlarm(http://pegelalarm.de). However, this first version quickly reached its limits. To implement the JValue ODS vision, a new architecture was necessary, which was designed by Mr. Georg-Daniel Schwarz in the work awarded here. In this work, Mr. Schwarz not only designed a microservice-based concept for a sustainable future of the ODS, but also implemented it in the first steps.
Mr. Schwarz is now a doctoral student at the Chair of Open Source Software, the organization behind the JValue ODS open source software, where he is helping to drive the further development of the ODS.

Benedikt Lorch is honored with the ASQF Award 2019 at the graduation ceremony of the Friedrich-Alexander University (FAU) Erlangen. The reason for the award is his thesis entitled “Forensic Reconstruction of Severely Degraded License Plates”, which received a grade of 1.0. The thesis was written at the Chair of Computer Science 1, under Prof. Dr. Felix Freiling. The award was presented by Norbert Kastner (Vice President ASQF) and Norbert Leger (Managing Director Clear Group).

In his thesis “Forensic Reconstruction of Severely Degraded License Plates”, Benedikt Lorch dealt with an innovative approach using artificial intelligence (AI) to decipher unrecognizable images of vehicle license plates. This can enable police authorities to gain additional investigative leads to solve a crime.

Benedikt Lorch’s work has shown that valuable information about the license plate can be filtered out of an apparently useless image. However, Lorch also points out that the magnification of a low-resolution image without additional information that is often shown in crime films belongs to the realm of fiction. Nevertheless, Mr. Lorch’s AI system achieves surprising accuracies on heavily blurred features that are only a few pixels in size. The work is characterized by high practical relevance in the context of forensic investigations and simple applicability.

The supervisors of the work were the well-known image forensic scientist Prof. Hany Farid at Dartmouth College and the image forensic scientist Dr. Christian Riess, head of the Multimedia Security working group at the Chair of IT Security Infrastructures at FAU Erlangen-Nuremberg. The results of the work were presented on January 14, 2019 at this year’s Electronic Imaging Symposium in Burlingame, California.

The Clear Group is this year’s supporter of the ASQF Sponsorship Award. It is a medium-sized company in the IT services sector and has been supporting its customers in all areas of software development for over 20 years. The focus in terms of both customers and employees is on the Nuremberg metropolitan region. The regional focus also formed the basis for the cooperation with the regional universities. Managing Director Jürgen Leger is therefore delighted to have been promoting and awarding prizes to young talents from FAU and TH for many years now.

The CLEAR GROUP ensures quality assurance in software development through high test coverage, regular code reviews and compliance with clean coding guidelines, among other things. In addition, the regional and supra-regional exchange of expertise is seen as an important aspect of involvement in communities such as the ASQF. The Lead Consultants and Test Managers are also regular speakers at ASQF conferences.

Kai Ehrensperger, Simon Eismann, Paul Wild, Michael Eischer, Marcel Busch, Ralf Spengler, THorsten Wissmann, Marius Kamp, Johannes Götzfried, Andreas Maximilian Wahl, Mona Lange, Martin Berger, Matthias Ring, Matthias Hoffmann, Franz Richter, Björn Kahlert, Sebastian MAte, Andreas Schuh, Michael Zollhöger, Mathäus Chajdas & Matthias Niessner, Heiko Kirsch, David Eckhoff, Martin Beyer, Andreas Rothlauf, Tobias Preclik, Thomas Holleczek, Michael Meinelt, Thomas Uhlmann, Thomas Schneider, Frederic Gurr & Benjamin Schmidt, Mario Frank Körner, Markus W. Weissmann, Norbert Tausch, Sven Kerschbaum, Michael Stilkerich & Matthias Bezold, Christiph Welcz, Helge Parzyjegla, Oliver Huras, Mr. Rückert, Andreas Wimmer, Stefan Meiler