Speaker - Oliver Kopp

Dr. Oliver Kopp is Acting Professor at the University of Hamburg, where he leads the Software Engineering and Construction Methods (SWK) group. He is an active open-source maintainer and contributor, best known in the community for his long-running work on JabRef, the open-source reference manager — including how the project is governed in practice, how responsibilities are distributed, and how contributors grow into maintainers over time.

Beyond JabRef, Oliver is active in the open-source adr community, where he co-developed the widely adopted Markdown Architectural Decision Records (MADR) format and its successor YADR, and he maintains the LaTeX Template Generator, a tool for producing robust, reusable LaTeX templates backed by GitHub Actions. His research focuses on software architecture and on making architectural decisions sustainable and usable in practice, spanning software engineering, business process management, and cyber-physical systems.

His industrial career includes a leading role in the BMWK-funded Software-Defined Car (SofDCar) project at Mercedes-Benz AG and a position at Nokia Bell Labs. He holds a PhD from the University of Stuttgart. Outside of work, he values spending quality time with his family.