Dirk Riehle's Industry and Research Publications

Category: 2. Building Products

  • There is no (Scrum) product owner

    There is no (Scrum) product owner

    One of the most difficult aspects of Scrum is the role of the product owner. Most software vendors have a product management function, typically split into strategic and technical product management. Technical product management is usually equated with Scrum’s product owner role, that is, the guy or gal who writes business-value-oriented user stories and epics,…

  • Agile feature teams vs. inner source

    Agile feature teams vs. inner source

    Agile methods reacquainted developers with the idea of working from business value rather than focusing on technical concerns only. Agile methods are therefore often equated with feature-driven development, in which work is driven by features prioritized by business value irrespective of technical consequences. This thinking can create code silos and wreak havoc on software architecture…

  • User experience design in software product lines [HICSS 2019]

    User experience design in software product lines [HICSS 2019]

    Abstract: User experience design is an important part of software product development, and yet software product line engineering has largely ignored this topic. This paper presents a set of industry best practices for user experience design in software product lines. We conducted multiple-case case study research using two different product lines within the multinational company…

  • The challenge of product management in commercial open source

    The challenge of product management in commercial open source

    Open source is a viable business strategy for software vendors to disrupt existing markets and conquer new ones. Just why is it easy in some markets and hard in others? I argue that you need to cut the product in such a way that there is a clear separation between what a never-paying community-user wants…

  • German engineering now and then

    German engineering now and then

  • Microservices vs. inner source

    Microservices vs. inner source

    I just listened to Eberhard Wolff’s BED-Con talk on microservice-based system architectures, which he prefers to call Independent Systems Architectures (ISA). One purpose of calling it ISA is to emphasize that there should be no common data model and no shared reusable libraries between microservices. Obviously, by discounting reuse, ISA may increase development speed short-term…