Dirk Riehle's Industry and Research Publications

Category: 2. Building Products

  • Is it “use” or “reuse”?

    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

    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

    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…

  • Open collaboration: Self-organizing innovation in large corporations

    Open collaboration: Self-organizing innovation in large corporations

    Author: Dirk Riehle, SAP Research, SAP Labs LLC Reference: Steven Fraser (editor). “Escaped from the Lab: Innovation Practices in Large Organizations.” In Companion of the 2008 Conference on Object Oriented Programming, Systems, Languages, and Applications (OOPSLA ’08). ACM Press, 2008: Pages 787-790. Available as a PDF file; my part follows as HTML below. Position statement…

  • End-user programming with application wikis

    End-user programming with application wikis

    Title: End-User Programming with Application Wikis: A Panel with Ludovic Dubost, Stewart Nickolas, and Peter Thoeny Author: Dirk Riehle Abstract: Wikis empower users to collaborate with each other using prose. Users imprint data structures and processes onto wiki pages using social and technical conventions. Application wikis enhance wiki engines with lightweight programming features that aid…