Latest Publications on Industry and Research
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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?
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![The commit size distribution of open-source software [HICSS 2009]](https://dirkriehle.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/10621-toronto-back-alley-300x150.jpg)
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…
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Learning from Wikipedia: Open collaboration within corporations
Wikipedia is the free online encyclopedia that has taken the Internet by storm. It is written and administered solely by volunteers. How exactly did this come about and how does it work? Can it keep working? And maybe more importantly, can you transfer its practices to the workplace to achieve similar levels of dedication and…
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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…
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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…
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The imperfection of search algorithms
This is a professional blog, so I usually leave humorous excursions into my life to my personal blog. Well, unless there is good reason for an exception. Today was such a day. That’s because today to much fanfare a new search service, improbably named CUIL was launched. A friend alerted me to the observation that…