Dirk Riehle's Industry and Research Publications

Category: 2.1 Engineering

  • Code of conduct for code reviews

    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).…

  • The Frankfurt opera house, criving C programmers crazy since 1972

    The Frankfurt opera house, criving C programmers crazy since 1972

  • Tabs vs. spaces and cause vs. effect

    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…

  • Fine-grained change detection in structured text documents [DocEng 2014]

    Fine-grained change detection in structured text documents [DocEng 2014]

    Abstract Detecting and understanding changes between document revisions is an important task. The acquired knowledge can be used to classify the nature of a new document revision or to support a human editor in the review process. While purely textual change detection algorithms offer fine-grained results, they do not understand the syntactic meaning of a…

  • System efficiency vs. fragility

    System efficiency vs. fragility

    I just listened to Padmasree Warrior on a Commonwealth Club podcast. Ms Warrior is the chief strategy officer at Cisco. The podcast contains lots of interesting insights and projections (as well as some incorrect statements, specifically that Google was the first search engine company and capitalized on a first-mover advantage). With Cisco being about all…

  • Developer Belief vs. Reality: The Case of the Commit Size Distribution [SE 2012]

    Developer Belief vs. Reality: The Case of the Commit Size Distribution [SE 2012]

    Abstract: The design of software development tools follows from what the developers of such tools believe is true about software development. A key aspect of such beliefs is the size of code contributions (commits) to a software project. In this paper, we show that what tool developers think is true about the size of code…