Bachelor-/Masterthesis (f/m/x) - Market Analysis: Composition Analysis of Space Flight Software

The DLR Institute of Software Technology sees software as a catalyst for research and innovation. The institute's staff, currently numbering around 200, make a significant contribution to advancements in the fields of aviation, space, energy, transportation, and security through the development of state-of-the-art software solutions and innovative research. Our areas of competence include reliable and safety-critical software systems, artificial intelligence, high-performance computing and quantum computing, human-system interaction and visualisation, software and systems engineering as well as digital platforms and digital twins.

What to expect
The Intelligent and Distributed Systems department researches methods to make complex technical processes and systems - from software development to automated workflows and AI-assisted analysis - traceable, automatable, and interactively experimentally accessible. Support the research group Sustainable Software Engineering, and share our goal of investigating how scientists (f/m/x) and engineers (f/m/x) develop software and how to efficiently and effectively support them in the endeavour. Using numerous Open Source components has - justifiably - become the standard of modern software development, but external components also come with risks, such as bugs, vulnerabilities, or unmaintained code. For software in highly critical applications (such as space flight) the detection and mitigation of these risks via composition analysis is mandatory.

Your tasks
As part of your thesis (Bachelor-/Masterthesis) you survey the state of the art, focusing on language-agnostic tools and the SBOM (Software Bill of Materials) ecosystem. You research available tools (Open Source as well as proprietary), investigate their adequacy for space flight software, and identify links with the relevant scientific literature. In addition, your tasks include:

* perform a market analysis of composition analysis tools for resilient space flight software
* evaluate select tools by developing one or several prototype CI workflows (advanced thesis/MA)

Your profile
* Student of computer science or similar
* Experience with code collaboration platforms (GitHub, GitLab, etc.)
The employment is unpaid within the framework of a residence agreement.

We look forward to getting to know you!

If you have any questions about this position (Vacancy-ID 2691) please contact:

Johann Schöpfer

Tel.: +49 8153282244