Entries tagged with software engineering research - Channel 9

Emre Kiciman and Ben Livshits - Doloto: Download Time Optimizer for Web 2.0 Apps

Peli de Halleux — Mon, 05 Oct 2009 22:33:00 GMT

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 automatically performs code splitting of existing large Web 2.0 applications.

The Research in Software Engineering team (RiSE) coordinates Microsoft's research in Software Engineering in Redmond, USA.

Trishul Chilimbi - Green - Energy Efficient Software

Peli de Halleux — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 20:17:00 GMT

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 consumption by as much as 20%. Watch this video to learn all the details about Green...

Green Technical Report
Green story on Microsoft Research

The Research in Software Engineering team (RiSE) coordinates Microsoft's research in Software Engineering in Redmond, USA.

Daryl Zuniga and Mike Barnett - Xml Documentation from Code Contracts for .Net

Peli de Halleux — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 22:55:00 GMT

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 compiler. Daryl also updated the Sandcastle stylesheets so that the contracts appear in the documentation pages.

Code Contracts for .NET home page - forums
See more Channel 9 videos on Code Contracts

Update: the xml comment generation is now available for download!

The Research in Software Engineering team (RiSE) coordinates Microsoft's research in Software Engineering in Redmond, USA.

Sebastian Burckhardt - Data Race Detection with CHESS

Peli de Halleux — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 18:31:00 GMT

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 data races, a very subtle kind of concurrency bug. You'll also learn how to drill into concurrency issues using the ChessBoard, a little application designed to drill and investigate concurrent tests.

CHESS home page: http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/chess/
CHESS forums: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-us/chess/threads/

The Research in Software Engineering team (RiSE) coordinates Microsoft's research in Software Engineering in Redmond, USA.

Margus Veanes and Pavel Grigorenko - Qex - Symbolic SQL Query Exploration

Peli de Halleux — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 23:59:00 GMT

Margus Veanes and Pavel Grigorenko present a new exciting project: Qex. Pavel did an internship in the Research in Software Engineering team (RiSE) investigating automatic data generation methods for parameterized SQL queries. In this video, he shows the result of his 3-month work. Qex translates SQL queries to logic formulas and give to our in-house constraint solver, Z3. When Z3 finds a solution, Qex translates that solution back to SQL code that can be executed in the database. This is similar to how Pex works.

Find more about Qex at http://research.microsoft.com/qex or read the technical report.

The Research in Software Engineering team (RiSE) coordinates Microsoft's research in Software Engineering in Redmond, USA.

RiSE at the International Conference on Software Engineering

Wolfram Schulte — Thu, 14 May 2009 19:07:00 GMT

Many researchers from the Research in Software Engineering team (RiSE) will be attending the 31st International Conference on Software Engineering in Vancouver (ICSE'09). Here is what RiSE is presenting this year:

Does Distributed Development Affect Software Quality? An Empirical Case Study of Windows Vista (ICSE: Research paper). Christian Bird, Nachiappan Nagappan, Premkumar Devanbu, Harald Gall, Brendan Murphy Winner of ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Papers Award. By studying the development of Windows Vista we evaluate whether distributed software development is more challenging than collocated development.
Do Crosscutting Concerns Cause Defects? (ICSE: TSE/TOSEM Session), Marc Eaddy, Thomas Zimmermann, Kaitlin D. Sherwood, Vibhav Garg, Gail C. Murphy, Nachiappan Nagappan, Alfred V. Aho. TSE/TOSEM Session. We asked the question, “How much does the amount that a concern is crosscutting affect the number of defects in a program?” and conducted three extensive case studies to help answer this question. All three studies revealed a moderate to strong statistically significant correlation between the degree of scattering and the number of defects.
Predicting Defects in SAP Java Code: An Experience Report (ICSE: Software Engineering in Practice papers), Thomas Zimmermann, Tilman Holschuh, Markus Päuser, Kim Herzig, Rahul Premraj, Andreas Zeller. In a study on a large SAP Java system, we evaluated and compared a number of defect predictors, based on code features such as complexity metrics, static error detectors, change frequency, or component imports.
HOLMES: Effective Statistical Debugging via Efficient Path Profiling (ICSE: Research papers), Trishul Chilimbi, Ben Liblit, Krishna Mehra, Aditya Nori, Kapil Vaswani. We describe a statistical debugging tool called HOLMES that efficiently isolates bugs by finding paths that correlate with failure.
The Secret Life of Bugs: Going Past the Errors and Omissions in Software Repositories (ICSE: Research Paper), Jorge Aranda, Gina Venolia. Every bug has a story behind it. This paper uses rich bug histories and survey results to identify common bug fixing coordination patterns and to provide implications for tool designers and researchers of coordination in software development
Guided Path Exploration for Regression Test Generation (ICSE: NIER Track).Kunal Taneja, Tao Xie, Nikolai Tillmann, Jonathan de Halleux, and Wolfram Schulte. Given two versions of the same software, the approach described in this paper can automatically generate a test suite that exercises only those program behaviors which are different. A prototype has been implemented as an extension to Pex.
Improving Bug Tracking Systems (ICSE: NIER Track), Thomas Zimmermann, Rahul Premraj, Jonathan Sillito, Silvia Breu. We present a prototype of an interactive bug tracking system that gathers relevant information from users and automatically identifies files that need to be fixed to resolve a bug.
Codebook: Social Networking over Code (ICSE: NIER Track). Andrew Begel and Robert DeLine. Codebook is a social networking service that connects software developers through the work artifacts that they share -- code, bugs, tests, specifications, etc -- to enable them to keep track of task dependencies, maintain connections to other teams, and understand the history and rationale behind the code they use.
Exploiting the Synergy between Automated-Test-Generation and Programming-by-Contract (ICSE: Demos). M. Barnett, M. Fahndrich, P. de Halleux, F. Logozzo, N. Tillman. Pex, a unit-test generator, and Code Contracts, a design-by-contract system, provide even more benefits when used together for developing high-quality robust programs.
VCC: Contract-based Modular Verification of Concurrent C (ICSE: Demos). Markus Dahlweid, Michal Moskal, Thomas Santen, Stephan Tobies, and Wolfram Schulte. Annotated C and the Verified C Compiler (VCC) form the first modular sound verification methodology for concurrent C that scales to real-world production code. VCC is currently used to verify the core of Microsoft Hyper-V, consisting of 50,000 lines of system-level C code.
Deconstructing Concurrency Heisenbugs (ICSE Demo). Thomas Ball, Sebastian Burckhardt, Madan Musuvathi, Shaz Qadeer. CHESS is a tool for finding and reproducing "Heisenbugs", which result from unexpected interference among threads. CHESS has been integrated into the test frameworks of many code bases inside Microsoft and is used by testers on a daily basis.
An Empirical Study of Testing File-System-Dependent Software With Mock Objects (AST Workshop)
Madhuri Marri, Tao Xie, Nikolai Tillmann, Jonathan de Halleux and Wolfram Schulte. A case study on how to use parameterized mock objects in unit testing in combination with the test input generation tool Pex.
A Brief History of Software - from Bell Labs to Microsoft Research (MSR workshop, keynote)

Tom will report on the power of combining statistical expertise with software engineering expertise to address pressing problems of software production in a statistically valid manner. He will trace the history from early work at AT&T to present work at Microsoft.
Making CHASE Mainstream (CHASE Workshop keynote), Rob DeLine. Rob will discuss why “people issues” have not gotten enough attention among software engineering researchers and suggests ways to make research in this area more mainstream.
Coordination in Large-Scale Software Teams (CHASE Workshop). Andrew Begel, Nachiappan Nagappan, Christopher Poile, and Lucas Layman. A survey of Microsoft engineers shows that coordination between large-scale software teams is very challenging, but can be eased with better communication and tools tailored towards each engineer’s role in the collaboration.

The Design of a Task Parallel Library (Working Group Software Engineering for parallel Systems, keynote), Wolfram Schulte. Wolfram discusses the design and implementation of the TPL, which makes it easy to exploit potential parallelism in a .NET program.
Parameterized Unit Testing (Tutorial): Principles, Techniques, and Applications in Practice.
Nikolai Tillmann, Jonathan de Halleux, Tao Xie, and Wolfram Schulte. A hands-on introduction to parameterized unit testing: how it relates to unit testing, how to leverage automated tools, what good test patterns are, and how it can be used in practice.

Cheers, Wolfram Schulte.

Mike Barnett - Getting started with Code Contracts in Visual Studio 2008

Peli de Halleux — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 22:40:00 GMT

Mike Barnett gives a step-by-step tutorial on Code Contracts, a new way to express preconditions, postconditions and invariants in any .NET language. The contracts team have built a runtime instrumentation tool and also advanced static checkers that can understand and reason about contracts.

The Code Contracts library can be downloaded for Visual Studio 2008 from the DevLabs web site. They will be part of the .Net framework 4.0!!!

Contracts @ DevLabs: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/devlabs/dd491992.aspx
Contracts @ Microsoft Research: http://research.microsoft.com/contracts
Contracts forums: http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/codecontracts/threads/

The Research in Software Engineering team (RiSE) coordinates Microsoft's research in Software Engineering in Redmond, USA.

Ben Zorn - Memory robustness with RobustHeap

Peli de Halleux — Mon, 09 Feb 2009 05:46:00 GMT

Ben Zorn gives an introduction to the problems of memory corruption. In particular, he talks about his work on new memory allocators that provide fault tolerance and detection of errors such as dangling pointers. Very cool whiteboard session, enjoy.

The Research in Software Engineering team (RiSE) coordinates Microsoft's research in Software Engineering in Redmond, USA.

Michal Moskal - VCC, The Verifying C Compiler

Peli de Halleux — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 10:25:00 GMT

Michal Moskal gives us a short introduction at the Verifying C Compiler (VCC) project. VCC is a tool that proves correctness of annotated concurrent C programs or finds problems in them. VCC extends C with design by contract features, like pre- and postcondition as well as type invariants. The current primary goal of the VCC project is to to verify Microsoft Hyper-V. Hyper-V is a hypervisor -- a thin layer of software that sits just above the hardware and beneath one or more operating systems. The Hypervisor verification project is a cooperation between European Microsoft Innovation Center in Aachen, Germany the RiSE group at Microsoft Research in Redmond and the Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany.

VCC slide deck, get the high-level picture and more details,
VCC home page, all you want to know.
Unfortunately, there is currently no download available of VCC.

The Research in Software Engineering team (RiSE) coordinates Microsoft's research in Software Engineering in Redmond, USA.

Ethan Jackson - Specifying Cloud Applications

Peli de Halleux — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 20:03:00 GMT

Today we talk with Ethan Jackson about Cloud applications.

Cloud applications are web-based distributed systems deployed over a fluctuating set of computing nodes and services. The design of cloud applications is particularly challenging because few assumptions can be made about the connectivity of nodes, the availability of services, and the long-term evolution of the computing fabric. Ethan describes a new approach to architecting cloud applications. His approach gives developers a powerful set of abstractions that they can use to engineer systems beyond a client-server architecture, while understanding the behavior of their applications in a cloud environment. This is part 1, where we introduce the basic concepts on the whiteboard.

BAM project home page

The Research in Software Engineering team (RiSE) coordinates Microsoft's research in Software Engineering in Redmond, USA.

Getting started with Pex in Visual Studio 2008

Peli de Halleux — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 19:38:00 GMT

Nikolai Tillmann and Peli de Halleux give a short tutorial on Pex, an automated white box testing tool for .Net. The tutorial is a pair-programming session where they show us how to get started with Pex in Visual Studio, starting from an (untested) piece of C# code:

how to use Pex to explore the behavior of any method in your code,
how to save the exploration results into a unit test suite,
how to improve the generated parameterized unit tests to leverage Pex code exploration engine.

If you want to follow up the steps on your machine as well,

The Research in Software Engineering team (RiSE) coordinates Microsoft's research in Software Engineering in Redmond, USA.

Madan Musuvathi - Getting started with CHESS in Visual Studio 2008

Peli de Halleux — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 18:40:00 GMT

Today we are sitting with Madan Musuvathi for a quick tutorial on writing concurrency unit tests, powered by CHESS in Visual Studio 2008. Madan goes through a simple bank account example that contains a subtle concurrency bug. He shows how to turn a unit test into a concurrent unit test in a snap, find concurrency issues and debug them using CHESS.

CHESS is an automated concurrency testing tool for .NET and Win32 that finds and reproduces heisenbugs.

Ask questions in the forum

The Research in Software Engineering team (RiSE) coordinates Microsoft's research in Software Engineering in Redmond, USA.

Software Transactional Memory: The Current State of the Art

Charles — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 20:19:00 GMT

A few years ago I got the chance to learn about Software Transactional Memory for the first time while visiting MSR Cambridge. The great Simon Peyton-Jones and Tim Harris explained to me the thinking behind STM and how it might evolve. It was a tremendously interesting conversation. If you haven't watched that interview, I highly recommend it as a precursor to this one. Today, STM is no longer only a research project. The Parallel Computing Platform team is incubating and extending the technology, finding that it may in fact work in the real world...

Of course, there is no silver bullet to solving the Concurrency Problem, but STM may be an important part of a larger solution (you've leraned a great deal about what Microsoft is up to in the concurrency and parallelism space here on Channel 9 and it should be somewhat clear by now that many of the technologies we've presented to you may end up as pieces of a broader solution...)

Here, STM Program Manager Dana Groff and STM Principal Developer Lead Yossi Levanoni discuss the current state of STM and outline the work their team is doing to craft this incubation/research technology into a practical real-world solution (STM is not available yet for experimentation. It's in incubation. It's not known if or when STM will become a viable product.). So, how has STM evolved over the past two years, anyway? Tune in.

Enjoy.

Maestro: A Managed Domain Specific Language For Concurrent Programming

Charles — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 19:46:00 GMT

Josh Phillips(PM), Niklas Gustafsson(Architect), and Artur Laksberg(Developer) of the Parallel Computing Platform Team spend some time with me to discuss a managed (.NET-based) DSL (Domain Specific Language) for concurrent programming, Maestro. Maestro incorporates well-entrenched language patterns (imperative, OO, C style syntax, etc) and language constructs (channels, agents, domains) in a compelling way to make concurrent composition more accessible and familiar to the legions of sequential code composers.

Here we dig into the architecture and design of the Maestro language and compiler as well as discuss the philosophy behind this incubation project (at this point in time there are no plans to release Maestro as a product - it's a research project, an incubation...). Why create another language to help solve the Concurrency Problem? What's the advantage over implementing a library (this is .NET after all -> CLR + BCL = most of the power of the platform)? There's obviously good reasons for implementig Maestro as a language, but you'll need to watch and listen to find out.

Enjoy.

Note: After this interview was conducted and posted to Channel 9, the Maestro team has renamed their technology to Axum. So, they are now the Axum team and the managed DSL for concurrent programming they're incubating is called Axum. :)

CHESS: An Automated Concurrency Testing Tool

Charles — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 21:46:00 GMT

CHESS is an automated tool from Microsoft Research for finding errors in multithreaded software by systematic exploration of thread schedules. It finds errors, such as data-races, deadlocks, hangs, and data-corruption induced access violations, that are extremely hard to find with current testing tools. Once CHESS locates an error, it provides a fully repeatable execution of the program leading to the error, thus greatly aiding the debugging process. In addition, CHESS provides a valuable and novel notion of test coverage suitable for multithreaded programs. CHESS can use existing concurrent test cases and is therefore easy to deploy. Both developers and testers should find CHESS useful. The CHESS architecture is described in this technical report.

Here, we meet some of the researchers behind CHESS, Madan Musuvathi and Shaz Qadeer. Joining in the conversation are two software test engineers extraordinare, Chris Dern and Rahul Patil. Chris and Rahul use CHESS as part of their daily routine of finding bugs in the various technologies that power Microsoft's Parallel Computing Platform. Tune in and learn about this great technology from the folks who know it best.

Nachi Nagappan - Experimental study about Test Driven Development

Peli de Halleux — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 19:59:00 GMT

This week, we dropped by Nachi Nagappan in the Empirical Software Engineering area. Nachi does studies on what works and does not work in software development using metrics.

We talk with him about Test Driven Development: Does it work better? How better? What's the catch?
To answer these questions, Nachi talks about a study done over multiple teams within and outside of Microsoft on TDD. The results are very interesting, as they are based on real teams with real products, so I definitely encourage you to watch the video or download the paper to grok the numbers in details.

Download the high-quality screencast from Downloads -> Screencast.
Download the full article on the TDD study at http://research.microsoft.com/ESM/ (Paper title: Realizing quality improvement through test driven development: results and experiences of four industrial teams).

The Research in Software Engineering team (RiSE) coordinates Microsoft's research in Software Engineering in Redmond, USA.

RiSE at the Principles of Programming Languages' 09

Peli de Halleux — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 00:10:00 GMT

Several RiSE researchers will present their latest joint work at the upcoming Principles of Programming Languages (POPL'09) conference (non RiSE authors are marked with *):

Tayfun Elmas*, Shaz Qadeer, and Serdar Tasiran will present: A Calculus of Atomic Actions.
Daan Leijen will present Flexible types: Robust type inference for first-class polymorphism [pdf].
Sumit Gulwani, Krishna Mehra* and Trishul Chilimbi will present SPEED: Precise and Efficient Static Estimation of Program Computational Complexity.
Sumit Gulwani, Tal Lev-Ami* and Mooly Sagiv* will present: A Combination Framework for Tracking Partition Sizes.
Jeremy Condit *, Brian Hackett*, Shuvendu Lahiri, and Shaz Qadeer will present: Unifying Type Checking and Property Checking for Low-Level Code.

Enjoy your reading!

The Research in Software Engineering team (RiSE) coordinates Microsoft's research in Software Engineering in Redmond, USA.

The RiSE of Research in Software Engineering

Peli de Halleux — Tue, 02 Dec 2008 19:25:00 GMT

Wolfram Schulte introduces us to the Research in Software Engineering (RiSE) group.

The RiSE group will start publishing weekly videos on Channel9. The videos will not only describe tools or technologies the researchers are working on, but they will also explain how the tools work through 'classroom' videos.

To stay tuned to upcoming videos, register to the RiSE RSS feed at http://channel9.msdn.com/tags/rise/RSS/

For more information about RiSE, check out our home page at http://research.microsoft.com/rise.

This is my first video shoot for Channel9, still learning the cameran's magic.

RiSE at PDC 2008

Peli de Halleux — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 21:44:00 GMT

The Research in Software Engineering (RiSE) from Microsoft Research had a strong presence at PDC 2008 with 3 booths, 4 sessions and 2 panels. Here is the list of talks that you can watch online on Channel9:

BAM, Doloto, AjaxView: http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/TL50/
CHESS: http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/TL58/
Code Contracts and Pex: http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/TL51/
Task Parallel Library: http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/TL26/
Future of Programming Languages: http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/TL57/
Future of Unit Testing: http://channel9.msdn.com/pdc2008/TL61/

CHESS interviewed by Mary-Jo Foley

Peli de Halleux — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 21:15:00 GMT

CHESS gets interviewed by Marie-Jo Foley. Read the full article at http://blogs.zdnet.com/microsoft/?p=1648.

CHESS is an automated tool for finding errors in multithreaded software by systematic exploration of thread schedules. More info at http://research.microsoft.com/chess .

RiSE at OOPSLA'08

Peli de Halleux — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 21:10:00 GMT

On Oct 22nd, Pietro Ferrara, Francesco Logozzo, and Manuel Fandrich present a new Program analsysis for "Safer Unsafe Code for .NET".

RiSE Research in Software Engineering launched

Peli de Halleux — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 21:03:00 GMT

In summer 2008, researchers from the software engineering and programming languages community at Microsoft Research in Redmond, USA, joined together to create the Research in Software Engineering (RiSE) initiative. Our mission is to mature software engineering by better (more predictable) understanding the software development process and the interaction with the humans involved, by providing better (more secure, reliable, efficient) languages and tools for describing, analyzing, testing and executing software, and by providing proper foundations. We do basic research, but we are also committed to help understand and improve existing processes, techniques and tools. We rapid prototype our ideas and help Microsoft product groups in the incubation and adoption of incremental and disruptive technologies. We actively and openly engage with the academic research.

More information at http://research.microsoft.com/rise .