Richard Wettel

Present

I am a software engineer, currently working at PostFinance in Bern, Switzerland.

Past

In my previous roles, I got to work with and learn from fascinating practitioners.

At CompuGroup Medical Schweiz, I worked with Tudor Girba and applied humane assessment techniques to deal with some of the challenges that arise when developing large software systems.

At Lifeware, I worked in an agile team of smart people on a rather unique insurance software product, built on top of a Smalltalk-based technology stack. It was there that I had the privilege to pair-program with Kent Beck and experience test-driven development firsthand.

I earned my Ph.D. in September 2010 from the Faculty of Informatics at the University of Lugano, Switzerland. The research I conducted there, at the REVEAL research group, guided by Prof. Michele Lanza, was mainly directed on software evolution, reengineering and reverse engineering, with a special focus on software visualization. I explored the potential of the city metaphor for the analysis of large evolving software systems by means of visualization and implemented a tool called CodeCity. My work on this topic, described in a number of publications, is synthesized in my Ph.D. thesis, entitled "Software Systems as Cities", described through the following word cloud:

Before that, I earned both my Engineering Diploma (2004) and Master's Diploma (2005) from the Faculty of Automatics and Computer Science at the "Politehnica" University of Timisoara, Romania. During the last years of undergraduate study, I was member of the LOOSE Research Group. Guided by Prof. Radu Marinescu, I worked on code clone detection and implemented a tool called DuDe. Here I had my first industrial experience, when we applied our code duplication technique on a prominent software system from the telecommunication industry, as part of a quality assessment project. At the time, I was also a Junior Researcher at the e-Austria research institute in Timisoara.

For an extended professional profile, please take a look at my CV.