Level 3 · Ph.D

Advanced Software Craftsmanship & Engineering Research

Ph.D syllabus · 56 phases · +1 year

Every unit this programme teaches, in the order it is taught. Headlines only — the material itself opens once you are enrolled.

Dates, price and prerequisites

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