Research in Developer Productivity Explored

  • Article

Dr Dobbs inteviewed Wolfram Schulte of Microsoft Research and discussed ongoing research in developer productivity in a posting, Microsoft Research: Looking for a RiSE in Developer Productivity. Schulte's team is tasked with reinventing all aspects of software development.

The Research in Software Engineering (RiSE) team is exploring how developers can better handle concurrency, static analysis, testing and others.

Among the research noted in the article:

  • Task Parallel Library (TPL) will ship as part of the Parallel Extensions to .NET in .NET Framework 4.0.
  • Static Driver Verifier toolkit, which helps eliminate blue screens from drivers in Windows and improves the reliability of the platform.
  • Pex project performs an intelligent exploration of software to systematically discover its behavior, thereby forcing it into the possibly faulty corner cases that manual testing is often unable to find.
  • The Singularity project provides static analysis enabled by type system extensions to C#.
  • BAM enables cloud applications to be specified as logic programs independently from implementation technologies and service connectivity. Complete, runnable, programs are then generated with the single push of a button.
  • AjaxView provides a view of the overall performance of a Web application.

Other research provides the underlying engine for most of our program analysis and testing tools, how to work with virtualized development teams spread around the world.

For more information, see Research in Software Engineering (RiSE),