Dirk Riehle's Industry and Research Publications

Category: 2. Building Products

The Frankfurt opera house, criving C programmers crazy since 1972

2015-11-27
Example login designed to make users go away

Schufa is a German credit rating agency. By law it is required to provide information to consumers (while it makes all its money, for now, off corporate customers). As a consequence, its password and login screens have been designed, I suggest, to be as unusable as possible. Below please find a screen-shot of the PIN…

2015-09-26
Tabs vs. spaces and cause vs. effect

Stack Overflow of the “full stackoverflow programmer” fame just published a developer survey. Among the items was a question asking developers, what they prefer for indenting their code: Tabs or spaces? The majority of developers prefers tabs over spaces by a reasonable margin. What worries me, though, is the conclusion or the “trend” that the…

2015-08-10
Inner source in platform-based product engineering [Technical Report]

Abstract Inner source is an approach to collaboration across intra-organizational boundaries for the creation of shared reusable assets. Prior project reports on inner source suggest improved code reuse and better knowledge sharing. Using a multiple-case case study research approach, we analyze the problems that three major software development organizations were facing in their platform-based product…

2015-05-20
M.B.A.s or engineers for product management?

I teach product management at a public German engineering school, where I am a professor of computer science. Product management is my nod towards “business informatics”, otherwise I only teach engineering courses (and one general how-to-perform-research class). There is an old debate as to who makes better product managers: M.B.A.s or engineers? Having worked on…

2015-03-15
Public upcoming talks on open source and inner source

A bit belated, I’m happy to announce two upcoming talks: Both talks are accessible to the public, see the flyers.

2015-02-05