Reinhold Plösch was born and raised in Salzburg and studied Business Informatics in Linz. Having finished his study he started as researcher at the Department of Business Informatics – Software Engineering. He worked on different projects in the context of object-oriented programming for process control systems in the steel industry. Doctoral dissertation in 1994 with a work on prototyping. After his dissertation he was member of the Christian Doppler Laboratory for Software Engineering and involved in an EU-funded project with contributions in software development processes and prototyping. Intense work on constructive quality assurance techniques (contracts, scenarios, prototyping) that flowed into his habilitation project (habilitation in 2004).
After his habilitation he started to establish the research area Software Quality at the Department of Business Informatics – Software Engineering. In this context close cooperation with research departments at Siemens Munich, Siemens India and in the context of a germany-funded project with Fraunhofer IESE, University of Stuttgart, Technical University Munich, Cap Gemini, SAP, etc. The intensive cooperation with Siemens also led to two research visits to India that were used to help introducing methods and tools for code quality management at Siemens India. Reinhold Plösch is inventor (together with others) of five international patents.
Parallel to establishing the research area Software Quality Reinhold Plösch provided input as key researcher for the topic areas SPICE-based process assessments for reuse in systems engineering and development of concepts for the evaluation of the quality of mechatronic objects. This research work was carried out in cooperation with the Software Competence Center Hagenberg (SCCH) and a systems engineering research department at Siemens Erlangen.
Currently he is Scientific Director of the “Institut für Personal- und Organisationsentwicklung” (IPO) at the Johannes Kepler University Linz. The IPO is a know-how transfer institute with an emphasis on system and software engineering, innovative technologies, organizational process diagnoses, software quality, etc.
Besides his teaching activities at the Johannes Kepler University (bachelor and master degree of business informatics and master degree of informatics) Mr. Plösch is lecturer at the University of Applied Science in Hagenberg.
Reinhold Plösch is author of two books and of approx. 100+ scientific publications in peer-reviewed journals or international conferences.
He is married, father of three children, associated with a charitable organization (Club 41), and loves to play tennis and to ski. He is enthusiastic about cooking and wine.