Research

Modern information systems are rarely built from scratch. They integrate legacy platforms, third-party services, in-house components, and increasingly incorporate AI. Moreover, they are built continuously and operate across distributed, cloud-native environments. The Information Systems Engineering research group, led by Prof. Sebastian Werner, studies how to engineer information systems that remain sustainable, trustworthy, and scalable as they grow in complexity. Our research focuses on quality-oriented software engineering, helping software architects make, quantify, and justify decisions throughout the conception, development, refactoring, and operation of information systems.

We argue that addressing cross-organizational qualities such as sustainability and trustworthiness requires the co-design of applications, platforms, and organizations. Applications, the platforms they run on, and the organizations that develop and operate them influence one another, creating dependencies and trade-offs that cannot be resolved within a single component or layer. We therefore study interventions across these levels and evaluate where they have the strongest effects — and, in particular, where such effects only emerge when applications, platforms, and organizations adapt together.

Our work investigates how these effects can be measured, attributed, and turned into evidence within and across organizational boundaries, and how stakeholders can be informed and incentivized to act on that evidence when making design trade-offs. We combine empirical studies of large-scale cloud-native applications with platform prototypes and new measurement approaches, ultimately turning system behavior into evidence that supports better architectural decisions.