Dirk Riehle's Industry and Research Publications

Category: 1. Software Industry

  • Estimating Commit Sizes Efficiently [OSS 2009]

    Authors: Philipp Hofmann, Dirk Riehle Abstract: The quantitative analysis of software projects can provide insights that let us better understand open source and other software development projects. An important variable used in the analysis of software projects is the amount of work being contributed, the commit size. Unfortunately, post-facto, the commit size can only be…

  • The Sweet Spot of Code Commenting in Open Source

    In a large-scale study of active working open source projects we have found an average comment density of about 20% (= one comment line in five code lines). Given that much of open source remains volunteer work, we believe that a comment density of 20% represents the sweet spot of code commenting in open source…

  • The Comment Density of Open Source Software Code [ICSE NIER 2009]

    Author: Oliver Arafat, Dirk Riehle Abstract: The development processes of open source software are different from traditional closed source development processes. Still, open source software is frequently of high quality. Thus, we are investigating how open source software creates high quality and whether it can maintain this quality for ever larger project sizes. In this…

  • There is no “Donating Code to the Community”

    There, he said it again, at the Open Source Meets Business conference in Nuremberg, Germany: “We would like to donate this code to the community.” Sounds great, doesn’t it? Well, I’m not so sure. Or, to be frank, I think if somebody talks about donating code to the community they probably don’t understand effective open…

  • Six Easy Pieces of Quantitatively Analyzing Open Source Projects

    I’ll be giving a talk at the Open Source Business Conference 2009 in San Francisco on March 24, 2009. The talk will present an easily accessible summary of our data-driven analytical work on how open source software development works. Here is the abstract: For the first time in the history of software engineering, we can…

  • Open Source Labor Economics…

    …is not nearly as sexy a title for an industry talk as is “Open Source Hacker Careers” so it had to go. The result you can observe at the 2009 Open Source Meets Business conference in Nuremberg, Germany, on January 28th, 2009, when I will be giving a talk (almost) so named. Open Source Software…