Upcoming Talk, Tsinghua University: Open Source Research

Abstract: Open source is not just software but also represents a new approach to software development. This type of software development is different from traditional plan-driven and agile methods and scales up to the largest project sizes. In this talk, I’ll show how open source differs from prior approaches and addresses questions of globally distributed software development. I’ll first present surprising results from quantitatively analyzing open source projects that show how open source software development actually proceeds. I’ll then use these insights to motivate new software engineering tools and show some examples. Finally I’ll discuss how software forges, a novel type of platform for collaborative software development, can complement current project management approaches to improve code reuse and knowledge sharing and to more effectively use developer resources.

Biography: Prof. Dr. Dirk Riehle, M.B.A., is the Professor for Open Source Software at the Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen-Nürnberg. Before joining academia, Riehle led the Open Source Research Group at SAP Labs, LLC, in Palo Alto, California (Silicon Valley). Riehle founded the Wiki Symposium, a conference dedicated to wiki research and practice. He was also the lead architect of the first UML virtual machine. He is interested in open source software engineering and agile methods, complexity science and human collaboration, and software design. Prof. Riehle holds a Ph.D. in computer science from ETH Zürich and an M.B.A. from Stanford Business School. He welcomes email at dirk@riehle.org, blogs at https://dirkriehle.com, and tweets as @dirkriehle.