Dirk Riehle's Industry and Research Publications

Category: 2.1 Engineering

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
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…

2014-09-16
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…

2014-04-21
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…

2011-12-17
On the Open Cloud Principles: Every Real-World Specification is an Underspecification

Trying to wrap my head around the Open Cloud Principles put out by the revamp of the Open Cloud Initiative, I’m happy to note that software engineering research has something to say to the challenges these principles will face. Every real-world specification is an underspecification. So, well, I say that, but I doubt that I’m…

2011-07-29
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…

2009-05-28