Author: Dirk Riehle

  • Why are There Only Two Research Groups Working on Inner Source?

    I got asked the other day why there are only two research groups working on inner source world-wide. Inner source is the use of open source best practices within companies, and it is a hot topic with many companies who want to go beyond agile. There was varied research around the world in the past…

  • The Fiercer the Competition, the More Companies Open Source

    How come that companies like IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft are leading so much open source these days? How is it possible that they harmoniously (most of the time anyway) collaborate with each other at the Apache Software Foundation or even Linux Foundation, while they fight each other to the bone in front of the customer?

  • Code of Conduct for Code Reviews

    On Twitter, @arkwrite suggested that a code review should always say something nice and @chaos_monster commented that we need a code of conduct for code reviews. All of this makes sense to me, however, I suggest that we first have a general code of conduct of productive discussions (and most companies have something like it).…

  • Who Writes and Prioritizes User Stories?

    I updated this post after I realized that it is more about prioritizing user stories than it is about writing them well. In Scrum, a product owner writes user stories to capture requirements and prioritizes them in a product backlog as the upcoming work queue for developers. The main question on my mind is: Who…

  • Product Manager vs. Product Owner

    Alistair Cockburn pointed us to an excellent article by Melissa Perri about the differences between a product manager and (Scrum) product owner. The article clarifies some confusion. I’d like to repeat and emphasize some points that have been omitted (and where I also disagree). Foremost, a product manager works on products for a market (i.e.…

  • Professors and Startups

    My primary goal in becoming a professor was to turn my (hoped-for excellent) research and teaching into startups. For that reason I created the Startupinformatik program and set-up my teaching to support it. Sadly, I’ve been noticing over the years that things don’t seem to get easier but harder. Specifically, “the system” (I’ll explain below)…