Software Research and the Industry

Ike Nassi, an Executive Vice President and my former manager at SAP, writes in an email: By accident, while reviewing a very old CACM paper “Programming Semantics for Multiprogrammed Computations” by Dennis and Van Horn from March 1966 (!) reprinted in the CACM 25th Anniversary issue (Volume 26, Issue 1 (Jan. 1983) Special 25th Anniversary [...]

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Authors: Dirk Riehle Abstract: An open source foundation is a group of people and companies that has come together to jointly develop community open source software. Examples include the Apache Software Foundation, the Eclipse Foundation, and the Gnome Foundation. There are many reasons why software development firms join and support a foundation. One common economic [...]

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2009 is coming to an end and so are my first four months as a professor. Time to take stock, if only shortly. The Open Source Research group posted a year-end summary for its first months There is initial sponsorship by Red Hat and Novell, demonstrating industry interest There was a fair amount of press [...]

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It is no big news that open source research has been growing strongly in recent years. However, the recent string of conference and workshop announcements is just amazing. Here is a short run-down of what reached me the last two weeks: 10.-12.02.2010: Workshop on the Future of Research on Free/Open Source Software (FOSS) 08.05.2010: 2010 [...]

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If you are interested in open source and software engineering, please take a look at these upcoming events: 27.12.2009: (F/L)OSS 2010, research program call for papers 11.01.2009: SSE 2010, a workshop on social software engineering 25.03.2010: OOPSLA 2010, research program call for papers 31.03.2010: Fourth F/LOSS Workshop Disclaimer: Except for the last one I’m on [...]

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As you may seen in an earlier blog post, I’m starting in a new position as a professor of software engineering focussing on open source software at the University of Erlangen. In this post, I’m laying out my abbreviated research agenda as of September 2009. The overarching goal of my group’s research is to comprehensively [...]

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After 12 years of working in the high-tech industry, I’m changing gears. I left my prior industry job and am starting today, September 1st, as the “professor for open source software” in the computer science department of the Friedrich Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg in Bavaria, Germany. This is a free (not tied to a chair) [...]

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For now, the final paper in this sequence of short publications of how open source software projects document their code. The paper is basically a more comprehensive summary of prior articles, with a bit more of data. Here the abstract and reference: Authors: Oliver Arafat, Dirk Riehle Abstract: The development processes of open source software [...]

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Author: Dirk Riehle Abstract: Design pattern density is a metric that measures how much of an object-oriented design can be understood and represented as instances of design patterns. Expert developers have long believed that a high design pattern density implies a high maturity of the design under inspection. This paper presents a quantifiable and observable [...]

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In software engineering, it is an old question whether you are “using” a component or whether you are “reusing” it. People tend to use these two terms interchangeably, annoying those among us who are trying to put precise meaning to terms. Alas, I don’t know of a good commonly accepted definition. I only know that [...]

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