His research focusses on "technologies, methods, tools ... necessary to create software in the necessary quality that is as efficient and sustainable as possible.
In 1992 he became research assistant at the Chair for Software and Systems Engineering at the Technical University of Munich, were in 1996 he received his PhD and in 2003 his habilitation in computer science.
From 2003 to 2008 Rumpe headed the Institute for Software Systems Engineering at the Braunschweig University of Technology (TUBS).
Since early 2009 he is Head of the Department Software Engineering at RWTH Aachen University[2] In 2001 he founded the Springer International Journal Software and Systems Modeling, together with his colleague Robert France and works there as an editor-in-chief.
[3] Rumpe contributed to the semantics and the use of modeling languages in software development (requirements, architecture, code generation, system configuration, quality management) based on the work started by his group Language Workbench MontiCore.