Dirk Riehle's Industry and Research Publications

Category: 2. Building Products

  • Talk Slides: Design Pattern Density Defined

    Here the slides for my OOPSLA Onward! 2009 talk on “Design Pattern Density Defined.” First the 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…

  • Design Pattern Density Defined

    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 definition of this…

  • Is it “Use” or “Reuse”?

    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…

  • Bringing Open Source Best Practices into Corporations Using a Software Forge

    You may have noticed our work on improving corporate software development at SAP using an in-house software forge. The main benefit is in transferring open source best practices to our software development processes. At an upcoming industry conference presentation I’ll be talking about some of the lessons we learned. Here is the abstract of the…

  • Open collaboration within corporations using software forges [Software Magazine]

    Open collaboration within corporations using software forges [Software Magazine]

    Abstract: Over the past 10 years, open source software has become an important cornerstone of the software industry. Commercial users have adopted it in standalone applications, and software vendors are embedding it in products. Surprisingly then, from a commercial perspective, open source software is developed differently from how corporations typically develop software. Research into how…

  • Every Complex System that Works Started Out as a Simple System that Worked

    The title of this blog post is my paraphrasing of a “law” from the tongue-in-cheek but nevertheless somewhat serious book “Systemantics” by John Gall. I tracked it down through Grady Booch’s original OOAD book and it had been pointed out to me by Ralph Johnson. What’s so special about this quote? Well, it frames an…