At this year’s FSE 2025 conference in Trondheim, we presented our vision paper  “Beyond Software Families: Community-Driven Variability”. It’s about the beautiful chaos in open-source, decentralized software ecosystems – such as Bitcoin – that exhibit multi-dimensional variability, yet strive for interoperability. We discuss this phenomenon of Community-Driven Variability (CDV), highlight emerging problems, and outline research goals to tackle them.

 Roman Bögli and  Thomas Sutter are organizing the workshop  Cryptographic Agility in the realm of PQS Algorithms + Security and Privacy Concerns on Android Phones in collaboration with the  University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland (FHNW) and the  Competence Centre Digital Trust. The workshop will take place on 29^th July 2025, 14:30 - 15:30, in person or online.

We are happy to announce that our paper titled Decades of GNU Patch and Git Cherry-Pick: Can We Do Better? by Alexander Schultheiß,  Alexander Boll, Paul Maximilian Bittner,  Sandra Greiner, Thomas Thüm, and  Timo Kehrer has been accepted to the  IEEE/ACM International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE) 2026.

We are organizing the  Software Engineering (SE) conference 2026 here in Bern! It will take place from 23^rd - 27^th February 2026 in various locations around the city. The main conference will be held at the  Wankdorf Stadium.

The Software Engineering (SE) conference of the  Software Engineering Division (SWT) of the  German Informatics Society (GI) is the reference conference series on Software Engineering in the German-speaking regions of Europe with an established record of engaging with Academia and Industry. It is held annually, and it serves as a platform for both software engineers from industry and researchers from academia to share their experiences and knowledge and to foster community building.

You can find all information on the  SE2026 website.

We are happy to share that our paper  Teach Variability! A Modern University Course on Software Product Lines, by Elias Kuiter, Thomas Thüm and  Timo Kehrer, received the best paper award at  VaMoS 2025. We are glad to see that our efforts in designing a new course on software product lines have been recognized by the community.