Christian Estler

Introduction

I'm postdoctoral researcher in the Chair of Software Engineering at ETH Zürich. I received my Master degree in Computer Science from the University of Paderborn, and completed my PhD under the supervision of Prof. Bertrand Meyer in December 2014.

Research

My current research interests include Distributed Software Engineering, Empirical Software Engineering, and Tools for Computer Science Education. I've worked on CloudStudio, a web-based IDE which supports real-time collaboration during my PhD.
Currently, I spend time developing Codeboard, a web-based IDE designed to simplify the way we teach programming courses and evaluate programming assignments.

Projects

• CloudStudio: a web-based IDE supporting real-time collaboration. Try online.
• Comcom: a tool to bring command line tools to the web.
• COAT: a contract analysis tool to study the long term evolution of contracts and code.
• Eiffel for MOOC: E4MOOC allows to make Eiffel programs available in the browser and is used to support online teaching.
• Codeboard.io: a web-based IDE for the classroom (example project below)

Publications

2015

• Paolo Antonucci, H.-Christian Estler, Durica Nikolic, Marco Piccioni, and Bertrand Meyer: A Progressive Hint System For Automated Programming Assignments. Accepted at: 20th Annual Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE), 2015

2014

• H.-Christian Estler, Martin Nordio, Carlo A. Furia, and Bertrand Meyer: Awareness and Merge Conflicts in Distributed Software Development. In Proceedings of the 9th International Conference on Global Software Engineering (ICGSE), pages 26--35, 2014 [pdf] [bib]
  (This paper won the ICGSE'14 Best Paper Award.)
• Marco Piccioni, H.-Christian Estler, and Bertrand Meyer: SPOC-supported Introduction to Programming. 19th Annual Conference on Innovation and Technology in Computer Science Education (ITiCSE), pages 3--8, 2014 [pdf] [bib]
  
• H.-Christian Estler, Carlo A. Furia, Martin Nordio, Marco Piccioni, and Bertrand Meyer: Contracts in Practice. In Proceedings of the 19th International Symposium on Formal Methods (FM), LNCS 8442, pages 230--246, 2014 [pdf] [bib]
  
• Martin Nordio, H.-Christian Estler, Bertrand Meyer, Nazareno Aguirre, Elisabetta Di Nitto, Rafael Prikladnicki, and Anthony Savidis: An Experiment on Teaching Coordination in a Globally Distributed Software Engineering Class. In Proceedings of the 27th Conference on Software Engineering Education and Training (CSEE&T), pages 109--118, 2014 [pdf] [bib]
  

2013

• H.-Christian Estler, Martin Nordio, Carlo A. Furia, Bertrand Meyer, and Johannes Schneider: Agile vs. Structured Distributed Software Development: A Case Study. Empirical Software Engineering, Springer, pages 1--28, 2013 [pdf] [bib]
  (This is an extended verison of the ICGSE'12 conference paper.)
• H.-Christian Estler, Martin Nordio, Carlo A. Furia, and Bertrand Meyer: Collaborative Debugging. In Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Global Software Engineering (ICGSE), pages 110--119, 2013 [pdf] [bib]
  (This paper won the ICGSE'13 Best Paper Award.)
• H.-Christian Estler, Martin Nordio, Carlo A. Furia, and Bertrand Meyer: Unifying Configuration Management with Awareness Systems and Merge Conflict Detection. In Proceedings of the 22nd Australasian Software Engineering Conference (ASWEC), pages 201--210, 2013 [pdf] [bib]

2012

• H.-Christian Estler, Martin Nordio, Carlo A. Furia, Bertrand Meyer, and Johannes Schneider: Agile vs. Structured Distributed Software Development: A Case Study. In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Global Software Engineering (ICGSE), IEEE, pages 11--20, 2012 [pdf] [bib]
  (This paper won the ICGSE'12 Best Paper Award.)

2011

• Martin Nordio, H.-Christian Estler, Bertrand Meyer, Julian Tschannen, Carlo Ghezzi, and Elisabetta Di Nitto: How do Distribution and Time Zones affect Software Development? A Case Study on Communication. In proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Global Software Engineering (ICGSE), IEEE, pages 176--184, 2011 [pdf] [bib]
• H.-Christian Estler and Heike Wehrheim: Heuristic Search-Based Planning for Graph Transformation Systems. In proceedings of the Workshop on Knowledge Engineering for Planning and Scheduling (KEPS), pages 54--61, 2011 [pdf] [bib]

2009

• D. Rayside, H.-C. Estler: A Spreadsheet-like User Interface for Combinatorial Multi-Objective Optimization. CASCON 2009: Markham, ON, Canada, November 2009 [pdf] [slides]
• D. Rayside, H.-C. Estler, D. Jackson: The Guided Improvement Algorithm for Exact, General-Purpose, Many-Objective Combinatorial Optimization. MIT-CSAIL-TR-2009-033, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2009 [pdf]

2008

• H.-C. Estler, H. Wehrheim: Alloy as a refactoring checker? Proceedings REFINE: Refinement Workshop, Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science, 2008 [pdf] [slides]

2006

• H.-C. Estler, T. Ruhroth, H. Wehrheim: Model checking correctness of refactorings - Some experiments. Proceedings REFINE: Refinement Workshop, Electronic Notes in Theoretical Computer Science, 2006 [pdf]

Teaching

• Fall 2014: teaching assisting for Distributed Software Engineering Laboratory
• Spring 2013: teaching assisting for Java and C# in Depth
• Fall 2012: teaching assisting for Distributed and Outsourced Software Engineering
• Fall 2011: teaching assisting for Distributed and Outsourced Software Engineering
• Spring 2011: teaching assisting for Software Architecture
• Fall 2010: teaching assisting for Introduction to Programming