Time to defend the dissertation

Since October 2008 I have been introducing myself as 'a technical consultant and a PhD student'. On the 28th of this month, around 16:15 hours I hope to drop the second part of this sentence!

Because June 28th (at 15:00 hours) I will start defending my dissertation against the eight members of my doctorate committee. The ceremony lasts for a little over an hour and is carried out according to a strict set of rules, which prescribe everything from the way in which everybody needs to be addressed up until the clothes that will be worn by the committee, my paranymphs and me.
 
The subject of the defense is my dissertation, titled 'Metric-Based Evaluation of Implemented Software Architectures'. If you have followed this blog you know most of the content by now since it is basically a compilation of my previous publications. If not, the easiest thing to do is to read through the summary enclosed in the PDF version of the dissertation. 

At first I was a bit skeptical about the usefulness of bundling all of the papers together since they are already published. However, writing down the overall story felt pretty good, and I must say that it was quite a joy to unpack the printed copies of the resulting book! (BTW, there are still a few copies left, so you can probably still get one of them at the defense).

Apart from asking questions about the dissertation itself, the members of the doctoral committee are also allowed to ask questions about one of the ten propositions that accompany the dissertation. Although I am not sure whether I can pull off a 'Project #tweetprop' (e.g. a short blog-post per proposition), but I'll definitely discuss the propositions in a later entry. So stay tuned!

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