HSE Faculty of Computer Science Organises Its First Software Engineering Winter School

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From February 14–18, the HSE Faculty of Computer Science organised its first international winter school dedicated to software engineering. The event was supported by JetBrains, Innopolis University, and Schaffhausen Institute of Technology.

A total of 837 participants from Russia, Europe, Asia, Africa, South America, North America, and Australia registered for the school.

The key topics of the school were modelling and tools, software architectures, software development methodology, coding and code management, team management, testing, DevOps, CI/CD, empirical software engineering, software engineering for researchers, and software process mining.

The school included lectures by Bertrand Meyer (Schaffhausen Institute of Technology), Yvonne Dittrich and Helge Pfeiffer (IT University of Copenhagen), Anton Arhipov and Alexander Nozik (JetBrains), Frank Pan (AliExpress Russia), Alexei Lisitsa (University of Liverpool), Sergey Shershakov and Irina Lomazova (HSE University FCS) and other representatives of academia and the industry. The full programme is available on the official website.

The participants shared their impressions of the school.

Sergey Shershakov, organiser

‘The Winter School on Software Engineering was held at the HSE Faculty of Computer Science for the first time. We managed to bring together leading experts from all over the world who work in all sorts of fields related to software engineering, from testing and verification to the development of new programming languages. The programme turned out to be intensive. Each of its five days was full of presentations, workshops and discussions. I am happy to see that the participants were active and kept attending the events despite their tiredness—many classes ended late at night.

We loved the idea of themed days. For example, the second day of the school was Kotlin Day. It featured presentations and workshops by JetBrains on the Kotlin programming language and its applications. That day was one of the most intensive and complicated, but also the most memorable. Next time, we are planning to organise more themed days about other topics as well.

Speaking of the next time, my colleagues and I feel inspired by the success of the first school and are going to make it a regular event, perhaps an annual one. I hope that our idea will be implemented and that next time, we will make the summer school on software engineering even more interesting!

I am very grateful to all school speakers and participants for supporting our idea and implementing it at the highest level.’

Anton Arhipov, Kotlin Developer Advocate, JetBrains

‘I am happy that a whole day was dedicated to Kotlin. This confirms that Kotlin is a serious programming language that is in high demand in the industry. I was also happy to talk about the basics of Kotlin online, since it makes the information accessible to people anywhere. But lectures on their own aren’t enough! I believe in a practical approach to learning, and highly recommend that students apply the knowledge they gained to their future projects.’

Tobias Lima-Engelmann, Uppsala University

‘The school covered a lot of topics, from testing methods to more abstract concepts of modelling. The practical parts were also useful and helped me learn something new. I know that it is difficult to communicate a lot in such a short period of time, but I believe the organisers succeeded in doing so. I also loved the online format: it is practical and allows a lot of participants to get involved. I believe I gained a lot of new knowledge on software engineering.’

Alessandro Benetti, University of Padua

‘Overall, the school turned out to be very useful and interesting. It was very well organised. The Kotlin Day was particularly useful, and had about nine hours of lectures and practical training.’

Johan Bergelin, Mälardalen University

‘I liked the school thanks to the variety of its lectures and the people. The participants were very diverse, which definitely helped everyone to broaden their outlook. For me as a doctoral student, many of the presentations were very interesting and served as a good introduction to topics that could turn out to be useful. I also had a chance to talk to other students and professionals. The online format worked very well. It might have been less interesting for the speakers due to the lack of feedback, but on the other hand, it allows more people to participate. I am satisfied with how the school turned out.’

Tobias Bindewald, HSE Graduate School of Business

‘I am very thankful to all the organisers and speakers. It was an intense, but informative week. I particularly liked that each speaker had professional experience: they really knew what they were talking about. For me personally, the Kotlin Day with Anton Arhipov and Alexander Nozik was the most memorable event. I am definitely going to use Kotlin in the future. I am looking forward to the next event!’

Johan Bergelin's photo courtesy of Mälardalen University