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Level 3 · Ph.D

Ph.D Advanced Software Craftsmanship & Engineering Research

Software · Live · v0

Doctoral software-engineering research — empirical methods, program analysis and tooling, testing science, and language engineering.

Path type

Software

Requirements

MSc Advanced Software Craftsmanship & Engineering Research

Enrollment

€19.95

Deadline

Next cohort starts 2027-09-06 (AY 2027/28)

Length

+1 year · 56 phases

Language

English · Español

Content freshness

Curriculum updated 2026-08-23 · content rev 7713ff0d

Cortex Credits (CC)

280 CC
What are Cortex Credits?

Syllabus

View the phase syllabus

0. From craftsperson to researcher
1. What we actually know about software quality
2. Reading & reproducing SE research
3. Software metrics, done honestly
4. Statistics for software experiments
5. The polyglot corpus as a research substrate
6. Research tooling v0 — AST/CST access per language
7. Does TDD work? The empirical record
8. Testing efficacy: coverage vs fault-detection
9. Code review, empirically
10. Refactoring in the wild
11. Design patterns, empirically
12. Productivity & the 10x myth
13. Replication study I
14. Lexing, parsing & concrete syntax trees
15. Static-analysis foundations
16. Type inference & abstract interpretation at tooling depth
17. Building a linter
18. Formatters as a solved problem
19. Fuzzing & symbolic execution for tooling
20. Tool-smith capstone I
21. Property-based & model-based testing at research depth
22. Mutation-testing internals
23. Automated test generation
24. Contracts & design-by-contract
25. Test flakiness
26. Lightweight formal methods
27. Testing-research capstone
28. The theory of refactoring
29. Refactoring detection & mining
30. Automated-refactoring engines
31. Semantic patching & large-scale transformation
32. Program synthesis & automated program repair
33. AI-assisted transformation, honestly
34. Transformation capstone
35. DSL design
36. Building an external DSL
37. Internal DSLs & fluent interfaces across languages
38. The Language Server Protocol
39. Building a language server for the DSL
40. Editor & IDE internals
41. Language-engineering capstone
42. Software architecture as a discipline
43. Architecture characterization & recovery
44. Software evolution & technical debt
45. Domain-Driven Design at depth
46. Concurrency & correctness craft
47. Performance engineering as craft
48. Frontier seminar I: AI & the future of the craft
49. Frontier seminar II: self-directed advanced topic
50. The research contribution
51. Systematization of Knowledge (SoK)
52. Research capstone I: design & measure
53. Research capstone II: the verified publication
54. Hardening & reproducibility: artifact evaluation
55. Frontier & close

Syllabus →

Enrolment prerequisites

• A verified account and admissions-committee approval.
• Completion of MSc Advanced Software Craftsmanship & Engineering Research.