Dirk Riehle's Industry and Research Publications

Category: 1. Software Industry

  • How Open Source Comments (by Programming Language)

    We recently looked at the commenting practice of active working open source projects. It is quite impressive: The average comment density of open source is around 19%. (Comment density is the percentage of text that are comments, or, more formally: comment density = comment lines / (comment lines + source code lines); for example, two…

  • The Perils of Going from Community to Commercial Open Source

    The growth and corporate adoption of many community open source projects is hindered by the lack of commercial support. At the same time, well working community open source is a temptation for startups to make a buck by turning the community project into commercial open source. We can currently observe the unraveling of such a…

  • Capobianco’s OSS 2008 Keynote

    Fabrizio Capobianco made the slides from his OSS 2008 keynote available. This is the same conference where we reported about the total (exponential) growth of open source. Unfortunately I had to leave right after our talk for the Wiki Symposium so I didn’t catch him nor could I listen to his talk. His slides, however,…

  • The Dominance of Small Code Contributions

    What is the most common size of code contributions to open source? Maybe 30 lines of source code? 200 lines? Or just one line? What’s your guess?

  • The Commit Size Distribution of Open Source Software [HICSS 2009]

    Authors: Oliver Arafat, Dirk Riehle Abstract: With the growing economic importance of open source, we need to improve our understanding of how open source software development processes work. The analysis of code contributions to open source projects is an important part of such research. In this paper we analyze the size of code contributions to…

  • Open Source Software Developer Careers

    How we develop open source software can vary widely from project to project. However, the roles we play are similar across projects: user, developer, tester, documenter, committer, etc. For a while now, I have been interested in what open source means for software developer careers, in particular with respect to fame and fortune. The figure…