On March 23, 2018, Marco Konersmann defended his doctoral thesis (Dr. rer. nat.) with highest honors.

In his dissertation "Explicitly Integrated Architecture — An Approach for Integrating Software Architecture Model Information with Program Code", he investigates the relationship between software architecture models and source code.

The "Explicitly Integrated Architecture" approach developed in the thesis integrates software architecture models completely with the program code, so that the models are no longer necessary as an independent artifact. The Codeling tool, which was developed as part of the doctoral thesis, extracts the integrated architectural models from the code in different languages and automatically propagates changes in these models back to the code. The doctoral thesis thus contributes to the consistency between models and code and to co-evolution of the two entities.