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Departments >> Faculty of Engineering >> Department of Computer Science >>
Professorship for Open Source Software
Address: Martensstr. 3, 91058 Erlangen
Phone:+49-9131-85-28390Fax:+49 9131 85-28809
E-Mail:dirk.riehle@fau.de
www:http://oss.cs.fau.de/

Our 2015 letter to stakeholders, available from http://osr.cs.fau.de/category/group/letters-to-stakeholders/

1. Summary

2015 marks the sixth year of the Professorship for Open Source Software at the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nürnberg. Revenues increased, the group size did not change, and student numbers are up. Publication output was good and appropriate for our group size. Teaching remains strong, with continued interest and support for our project-based teaching model by industry.

2. Research

Our research goal is to understand how open collaboration works, see http://osr.cs.fau.de/about/group/ and http://www.opensym.org/about-us/definition/ and apply our learnings to software engineering.

Focus of research

2.1 Research Focus Areas

Our focus areas resp. projects remained stable:

  • Requirements Engineering (Andreas Kaufmann, project QDAcity, started 2014-01-01). We are exploring the use of qualitative data analysis method for requirements engineering. We expect to improve traceability, quality, and speed by which we determine a broad range of requirements engineering artefacts.

  • Open Source Processes and Project Communities (Ann Barcomb, project N.N., started 2013-01-01). We are trying to understand the concepts, processes, and tools that make open collaborative communities work. A particular goal is the creation of a best practices handbook for managing such communities.

  • Software Economics (Dirk Riehle, various projects, on-going). We are investigating the economic principles underlying the software industry with a particular emphasis on open source projects. A key focus are open source business strategies. We are currently guiding an open source consortium in the German energy industry.

  • Open Collaborative Knowledge Management (Hannes Dohrn, project Sweble, started 2010-01-01). We are investigating the open collaborative creation of one particular kind of knowledge, namely best practices handbooks. A future extension of this work is a system for domain-expert programming.

  • Inner Source Software Development (Maximilian Capraro, project N.N., started 2014-01-01). We are investigating how to bring the best practices of open source collaboration to proprietary software development. Together with our research partner Black Duck Software, we are working on new tools for inner source development.

You can read more about our research concept at http://osr.cs.fau.de/2013/11/27/das-forschungskonzept-der-professur-fur-open-source-software-an-der-friedrich-alexander-universitat/ and about the research areas at http://osr.cs.fau.de/research/projects/.

Research-relevant technical equipment

Please remove this heading from the annual report. Thank you!

Cooperation partners

Please remove this heading from the annual report. Thank you!

2.3 Research collaborations

Among our research collaborations, the one with Prof. Minghui Zhou of Peking University stands out. She visited our group in early October 2016 for collaboration talks and review of existing work. We hope to build on our prior joint publications in the future. Prof. Zhou invited Prof. Riehle to the 99th Shonan Meeting, Japan, to take place in 2017. Shonan is Japan’s Dagstuhl.

We also intensified our collaboration talks with Malaysian universities, most notably MMU and USM and hope to formalize the relationship in 2017.

Conferences and workshops

2.3 Research Conferences

In 2015, Prof. Riehle chaired the 11th International Symposium on Open Collaboration, a conference he founded back in 2005. OpenSym 2015 took place in San Francisco, California. OpenSym 2016 will be held in Berlin, Germany, for the second time. For more about OpenSym, please see http://opensym.org.

Publication series

Please remove this heading from the annual report. Thank you!

3. Teaching

The time-frame for the teaching section of this letter is the 2015/16 academic year, that is, the winter semester 2015/16 and the summer semester 2016. The winter semester 2016/17 will be covered in next year’s letter. As a heads-up, a key development is the increasing provision of our teaching on Youtube.

3.1 Noteworthy and interesting

Our ever popular course on agile methods, The AMOS Project, broke a new record and offered seven projects with industry partners in parallel. We were oversubscribed by industry and with more students could have done more projects.

The Alexander, FAU’s news magazine, reported with a two-page spread on one student project. It showed well the enthusiasm of our students and what they can achieve in the course of a semester-long project. Learn more at https://osr.cs.fau.de/2016/10/31/faus-alexander-reports-about-the-2016-amos-projects/

In 2016, we also started a new course, on Free/Libre, and Open Source Software, called FLOSS. It was the most popular elective course we have taught so far, with over 100 students participating. We were surprised by the enthusiasm. The reader may wonder why we haven’t had this course for a long time, and the answer is rather simple: We felt we have to teach much more basic courses in software engineering to cover some of the deficiencies of our graduates before we could take on this elective. Now, if student vote by feet would count, we might be considered wrong!

3.2 Courses and student numbers

Student numbers kept growing and we reached another record participation in our electives courses, as shown by the following graph. Course shorthands are explained in our https://osr.cs.fau.de/teaching/overview/

Figure 2: Number of students in elective courses (not cumulative), see https://osr.cs.fau.de/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/student-numbers.png

3.3 Final student theses

This growing student interest was also reflected in the number of final theses performed with us. It is worth pointing out that we take a proportionally large share of Master (rather than Bachelor) students, presumably because our lectures are not part of the base curriculum and we are not seen by students during their Bachelor days. These numbers are also not cumulative.

Figure 3. Number of final theses (not cumulative), see https://osr.cs.fau.de/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/final-theses.png

4. Industry

The time-frame for the industry section of this letter is the 2016 calendar year.

4.1 Engagement

It was another busy year for Prof. Riehle, engaging with industry. He gave more than 25 talks, on average one every second week of the year.

The first formal point of contact for industry partners with our group are often teaching projects (“Lehrprojekte”). In these projects, companies sponsor the topic of exercise for a project course and thereby engage with us and students. In AMOS, our agile methods course, this year’s industry partners were Sivantos, Develop Group, AVL DiTest, Senacor, Siemens CT, knowis, and Continental. In ARCH, our course on software architecture, the industry partner was SerNet.

Taking the next step, Healthineers, Siemens Digital Factory, Continental Corporation, and one unnamed (required by contract) company sponsored research projects on open source and inner source. The projects started during the course of the year and are all expected to run for three years, or longer.

4.2 Startups

The Introdoyou team (see last year’s report) decided to disband after disagreement between the student founders became unbearable.

One of the students, Matthias Lugert, now graduated, decided to stay with us and is now leading the Uni1 startup. Waiting for EXIST funding, the startup has not been founded yet, but we are actively testing the waters at http://uni1.de

5. Finances

The time-frame for the fundraising section of this letter is the 2016 calendar year.

5.1 Funds raised

The 2016 revenues of the research group were EUR 524,590. If nothing changes and we just stick with the current projects, revenues in 2017 will be EUR 618,385, representing a steady five-year climb of more than 20% growth each year. We hope to exceed this baseline.

Figure 4. Revenues over time (not cumulative), see https://osr.cs.fau.de/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/revenues.jpg

5.2 Other issues

As is typical for universities, expenses closely trail revenues, as most of the income goes to paying salaries to employ researchers (“wissenschaftliche Mitarbeiter”). This is also the case with our group.

Total taxes paid to the university (overhead and other expenses) were EUR 93,200 and are expected to jump sharply in 2017. We are doing our part to help keep the university afloat.

6. Alumni

By the end of the 2015/16 academic year (September 2016), 62 of our 88 final thesis students had registered on our alumni network (currently a LinkedIn group pending better infrastructure support for alumni through the University).

Several alumni attended the 2016 alumni event, jointly sponsored by our research group and Appwork GmbH, which is run by two of our alumni, Thomas Rechenmacher and Daniel Wilhelm.

Photo 1. Taken at the Appwork office, where we held this year’s winter alumni event, see https://osr.cs.fau.de/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/alumni-event.jpg

7. Thank you!

What is left for us is to say thank you to all our partners and colleagues and to wish you all a happy holidays and a most successful and rewarding 2017!

Photo 2. Taken in our kitchen Oct 2016, with guest Prof. Minghui Zhou of Peking University, to the left, see https://osr.cs.fau.de/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/happy-group.jpg

For the Professorship of Open Source Software,

Prof. Dr. Dirk Riehle, Dec 2016.

Professor
Prof. Dr. Dirk Riehle, MBA

Secretary
Pei Hsien Chuah
Ivone Ferreira
Agnes Low
Anna Sielski
Grace Ting, Ph.D.

Scientific Staff
Dr. Ann Barcomb
Andreas Bauer, M. Sc.
Stefan Buchner
Dr.-Ing. Maximilian Capraro
Dipl.-Inf. Hannes Dohrn
Michael Dorner, M. Sc.
Reza Ghanbari
Manuel Guttenberger
Dr.-Ing. Nikolay Harutyunyan
Philip Heltweg
Julian Hirsch, M. Sc.
Dipl.-Inf. Gottfried Hofmann
Simone Jugel
Dr. Ing. Andreas Kaufmann
Daniel Knogl, M. Sc.
Dipl.-Inf. (FH) Carsten Kolassa, M. Sc.
Julian Lehrhuber
Dipl.-Inf. Johannes Link
M. Sc. Julia Mucha
Mark Rudtke
Michel Alexandre Salim, M. Sc.
Sebastian Schmid, M. Sc.
Bettina Schwab, M. Sc.
Georg Schwarz, M. Sc.
Taina Temmen
Elcin Yenisen Yavuz, M. Sc.

Guest
Prof. Dr. Robert Biuk-Aghai
Prof. Ian Chai, Ph.D.
Giovanna Luisi, M. Sc.
Dr.-Ing. Erich Meier
Dr.-Ing. Thomas Otter
Dr. Wolf Siberski

Alumni
Dr. Ann Barcomb
Andreas Bauer, M. Sc.
Dr.-Ing. Maximilian Capraro
Dipl.-Inf. Hannes Dohrn
Michael Dorner, M. Sc.
Manuel Guttenberger
Michael Haase
Dipl.-Inf. Gottfried Hofmann
Bastiaan Jacques
Mitchell Joblin, B. Sc. (Hons)
Daniel Knogl, M. Sc.
Dipl.-Inf. (FH) Carsten Kolassa, M. Sc.
Dipl.-Inf. Johannes Link
Felix Quast, M. Sc.
Mark Rudtke
Michel Alexandre Salim, M. Sc.
Sebastian Schmid, M. Sc.
Bettina Schwab, M. Sc.
Dipl.-Ing. Markus Stipp
Taina Temmen
Grace Ting, Ph.D.
Dipl.-Betriebsw. (FH) Christoph Wille, M. Sc.
Mathias Zinnen, B. Sc.

Ongoing and recently completed research projects (period under report: 1.1.2018-31.12.2018)

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