CSAIL Event Calendar

PL/SE Seminar: What

Software developers primarily rely on experience and intuition to make
development decisions. I will describe speculative analysis, a new
technique that helps developers make better decisions by informing
them of the consequences of their likely actions.

As a concrete example, I will consider collaborative development and
the conflicts that arise when developers make changes in parallel.
This is a serious problem. In industry, some companies hire
developers solely to resolve conflicts. In open-source development,
my historical analysis of over 140,000 versions of nine systems
revealed that textual, compilation, and behavioral conflicts are
frequent and persistent, posing a significant challenge to
collaborative development. Speculative analysis can help solve this
problem by informing developers early about potential and existing
conflicts. Armed with this information, developers can prevent or
more easily resolve the conflicts. I will demonstrate Crystal, a
publicly available tool that detects such conflicts early and
precisely. Crystal has inspired a collaboration with Microsoft and
some Microsoft teams now use a version of the tool in their everyday
work.

Bio:
Yuriy Brun is an assistant professor at the University of
Massachusetts, Amherst. Yuriy’s research interests are in software
system modeling, design, and development. Previously, he served as a
CI Fellow at the University of Washington, received his Ph.D. degree
in 2008 from the University of Southern California, as an Andrew
Viterbi Fellow, and received his M.Eng. degree in 2003 from MIT. His
doctoral research was a finalist in the ACM Doctoral Dissertation
Competition in 2008. His most recent work on speculative analysis,
the subject of his talk, won a 2011 ACM SIGSOFT Distinguished Paper
Award.
http://people.cs.umass.edu/~brun

See other events happening in October 2012