Software Engineering Research

"Everyone of us knows how to develop software, but as an industry we don't know it!" or so Ivar Jacobson argues. Software engineering is severly hampered today by immature practices. I got chance to talk to the great Ivar Jacobson backstage at Architect Insight about his work in software…

In this episode of The Verification Corner, Rustan Leino, Principal Researcher in the Research in Software Engineering (RiSE) group at Microsoft Research, shows how to prove loop termination. During his demonstration, Rustan presents the theoretical background information necessary to build the…

In this episode of The Verification Corner, Rustan Leino talks about Loop Invariants.  He gives a brief summary of the theoretical foundations and shows how a program can sometimes be systematically constructed from its specifications.  Rustan Leino is a Principal Researcher in the…

Nikolaj Bjørner and Leonardo de Moura are Researchers in the Research in Software Engineering (RiSE) team at Microsoft Research. They are talking and demoing Z3, a high-performance SMT constraint solver. Solving constraint systems is the root of of many software…

Francesco Logozzo, a researcher at the Research in Software Engineering (RiSE) group at Microsoft Research, gives a demo of the Static Checker that comes with Code Contracts for .NET tools. The static checker allows you to verify that all the assertions in your code hold…

Juan Chen and Nikhil Swamy, two researchers at the Research in Software Engineering group, present FINE, a new programming language for .NET.Software systems are governed by increasingly complex security policies. Ensuring that a system properly enforces its policy is hard. FINE is a…

Emre Kiciman and Ben Livshits present the ideas behind Doloto. Doloto is an AJAX application optimization tool, especially useful for large and complex Web 2.0 applications that contain a lot of code, such as Bing Maps, Hotmail, etc. Doloto analyzes AJAX application workloads and…

Trishul Chilimbi, a researcher from RiSE talks about Green. Green enables programmers to approximate expensive functions and loops while providing statistical quality of service guarantees. By giving away a couple percents of QoS, some applications may decrease their energy…

Mike Barnett and Daryl Zuniga, a high school intern at RiSE, sit down to talk about Code Contracts for .NET and documentation. Daryl has been working this summer on a tool that inserts contracts elements into the Xml Documentation files generated by the C#/VB…

Sebastian Burckhardt gives a short tutorial of some of the new features of CHESS: data race detection and ChessBoard. CHESS is a concurrency testing tool takes a concurrent unit test and executes it with different thread schedules. Sebastian explains us how CHESS can detect…