The year is 1993, and I give my very first talk at a big software engineering conference. Right in the middle of my example, a professor stands up and exclaims with a mocking smile “To me, this looks like a solution looking for a problem!”. The audience erupts in laughter, and my advisor sits in the first row, grinning. How would I get out of there? And why would this experience shape all of my career from now? Telling three stories around three conference events, I unfold lessons on impact in software engineering research: Do relevant work – strive for simplicity – keep on innovating.

Andreas Zeller is a full professor for Software Engineering at Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany. His research concerns the analysis of complex software systems, their security properties, and their development process. His students are funded by companies like Google, Microsoft, or SAP. In 2010, Zeller was inducted as Fellow of the ACM for his contributions to automated debugging and mining software archives. In 2011, he received an ERC Advanced Grant, Europe’s highest and most prestigious individual research grant, for work on specification mining and test case generation. In 2013, he co-founded Testfabrik AG, a start-up for automatic testing of Web applications.