Category Archives: Software Engineering

Teaching Materials for Agile Methods Course

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I finally put my teaching materials for my agile methods course on this website. The slides are available in “source” form, i.e. Open/LibreOffice format, as well as PDFs. I also added supplementary materials like the videos I use for illustration purposes. The slides are made available using the Creative Commons BY-SA license and are based on a course I’ve been giving several times now. It is far from being perfect but obviously good enough for a real course. Feel free to use or copy from the slides for your own courses!

My goal is to keep improving the slides. I expect there to be a new version every year or maybe every semester. For me, this is an experiment. I honestly don’t know how to collaborate around a format like ODP and ODT. It sure doesn’t feel like source code. So, my best suggestion is that if you find this useful and would like to see it improve in a direction that suits you, please let me know of your suggestions. I might then incorporate the suggested changes into the slide set. In general, my philosophy is that the content will grow, but ideally in a consistent fashion.

Tracking and Preparing for ECOOP 2012

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Here is useful information from the chair if you are considering attending ECOOP 2012 in Beijing!

  1. We have a Facebook page for announcements: http://www.facebook.com/events/221514727865075/
  2. We have a travel page where people can plan and discuss travel arrangements http://www.facebook.com/events/314574741939037/
  3. ECOOP registration is now live at http://ecoop12.cs.purdue.edu. Early registration deadline is May 1st. Please register early.
  4. There is funding for student travel to PLDI+ECOOP: http://pldi12.cs.purdue.edu/content/students
  5. Students are also encouraged to participate as volunteers (free ECOOP+ registration): http://ecoop12.cs.purdue.edu/content/call-student-volunteers
  6. The PLDI Student Research Competition (http://pldi12.cs.purdue.edu/content/student-research-competition) and the ECOOP PhD Symposium (http://ecoop12.cs.purdue.edu/content/ecoop-2012-doctoral-symposium) are open for submissions.

See you at ECOOP 2012 in Beijing!

Agile Methods Course at Tsinghua University

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Update 2012-03-28: I made the course slides available to the public.

I just finished teaching a one-week course on agile methods at Tsinghua University, the top (mainland) Chinese engineering school and one of the two leading Chinese universities. My host told me that I was the first non-Chinese-speaking lecturer to have held such a short course, not only in Computer Science but at Tsinghua as a whole. (I’m sure there have been plenty of prior foreign lecturers, but apparently I was the first one not to teach for a whole semester, but only for this condensed one-week half-day type of course). Yay! Adventure and breaking new grounds is still possible on this planet.

Moreover, with my research partner Prof. Bai, I’ll be leading a joint distributed agile software development project, involving student teams from both Tsinghua University (THU) and Friedrich-Alexander University (FAU). The goal of the project is to learn about what makes or breaks distributed agile development. We’ll start with simple hypotheses but hope to grow this into something larger. We already have student teams, but are looking for more. If you are a software engineering student at either THU or FAU, please come and talk to us!

Do Engineering Researchers Care About Truth?

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So ICSE, the top software engineering conference, rejected our paper, again. The reviewers were actually quite positive: high-quality work, little or no flaws, interesting. One of the reviewers found the paper’s results surprising, asked for more details, and suggested new research directions. The final conclusion of both reviews, however, was the same: The work has no merit because it only explains the world, it does not improve it.

Our paper provides a high-quality model of a key aspect of programming behavior in open source, basically the modeling behind this earlier empirical paper. As such, it is a descriptive empirical paper. It takes a large amount of data and provides an analytically closed model of the data so that we can explain or predict the future (better). That’s pretty standard operating procedure in most of natural and social sciences.

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Developer Belief vs. Reality: The Case of the Commit Size Distribution

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Abstract: The design of software development tools follows from what the developers of such tools believe is true about software development. A key aspect of such beliefs is the size of code contributions (commits) to a software project. In this paper, we show that what tool developers think is true about the size of code contributions is different by more than an order of magnitude from reality. We present this reality, called the commit size distribution, for a large sample of open source and selected closed source projects. We suggest that these new empirical insights will help improve software development tools by aligning underlying design assumptions closer with reality.

Reference: Dirk Riehle, Carsten Kolassa, Michel A. Salim. “Developer Belief vs. Reality: The Case of the Commit Size Distribution.” In Proceedings of Software Engineering 2012 (SE ’12). Springer Verlag, 2012.

The paper is available as a PDF file. The survey used in the paper is also available as a PDF file.

Business Risks and Governance of Open Source in Software Products (in German)

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Titel: Geschäftsrisiken und Governance von Open-Source in Softwareprodukten

Zusammenfassung: In fast jedem Softwareprodukt, auch in großer Standardsoftware, sind heute Open-Source-Komponenten enthalten. Die Hersteller dieser Software müssen die Geschäftsrisiken, die mit der Integration von Open-Source-Software in kommerzielle Produkte verbunden sind, verstehen und vernünftig managen. Dieser Artikel zeigt ein Modell verschiedener rechtlicher, technischer und sozialer Risiken auf, die durch unkontrollierten Einsatz von Open-Source-Software entstehen und erläutert ausgewählte Erfolgsmethoden der Open-Source-Governance, die von führenden Firmen angewandt werden. Das Modell ist das Analyseergebnis von fünf mit großen deutschen Softwareherstellern geführten Interviews sowie weiterer Literaturrecherche.

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Call for Papers: OSS 2012

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For your convenience, the OSS 2012 call for papers (I’m on the program committee).

THE 8th INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON OPEN SOURCE SYSTEMS

Hammamet, Tunisia, 10-13 September 2012

Scope of OSS 2012

Over the past two decades, Free/Libre Open Source Software (FLOSS) has introduced new successful models for creating, distributing, acquiring and using software and software-based services. Inspired by the success of FLOSS, other forms of open initiatives have been gaining momentum. Open source systems (OSS) now extend beyond software to include open access, open documents, open science, open education, open government, open cloud, open hardware, open artworks and museum exhibits, open innovation and more. On the one hand, the openness movement has created new kinds of opportunities such as the emergence of new business models, knowledge exchange mechanisms, and collective development approaches. On the other hand, the movement has introduced new kinds of challenges, especially as different problem domains embrace openness as a pervasive problem solving strategy. OSS can be complex yet widespread and often cross-cultural. Consequently, they require an interdisciplinary understanding of their technical, economic, legal and socio-cultural dynamics.

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Call for Papers: ECOOP 2012

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For your convenience, the ECOOP 2012 call for papers (I’m on the program committee).

Call for Papers 征稿启事

The European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming (ECOOP) is the premium international conference covering all areas of object technology and related software development technologies. ECOOP 2012 will take place from 11-16 June, 2012 in Beijing, China — only the second time ECOOP has been held outside Europe. ECOOP 2012 embraces a broad range of topics related to object-orientation, including:

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Call for Papers: Software Product Lines (SPLC 2012)

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For your convenience, the SPLC 2012 call for papers (I’m on the program committee).

Call for Contributions (SPLC 2012)

We invite the following classes of contributions:

  1. Research papers: (max. 10 pages, 5 for short papers) describe original research contributions (theoretical, conceptual) to the field of software product line engineering. We also call for short research papers, which are intended to report ideas in their early stages. Submission deadline: Feb. 20th, 2012.

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