Backstory is a search client app that goes beyond a textbox and ten results. It allows you to search over multiple repositories with a few clicks, view search results with excellent previews, and manage your search results. Backstory is relevant for any in-depth investigations that involve multiple queries, browsing and exploring to find relevant information. There is no public download available at this time.

The Bridge was a database aggregating information from multiple software development repositories. What made it unique was that it built a graph over the artifacts based both on structural relationships among the items but also textual allusions in plain-text.

CARES (Colleagues and Relevant Engineers' Support) is a Visual Studio 2010 editor extension that displays a list of the people who have checked in changes to the file currently open in the editor.

Code Canvas is a new user experience for Visual Studio 2010 that provides an infinite zoomable surface for software development. A canvas both houses editable forms of all of a project’s documents and allows multiple layers of visualization over those documents. By uniting the content of a project and information about it onto a single surface, Code Canvas is designed to leverage spatial memory to keep developers orient-ed and to make it easy to synthesize information.

Everyone and everything is connected. Codebook is a platform that uses a social networking-inspired approach to connect artifacts and people in software repositories.

Several researchers have been studying software teams at Microsoft to see how they communicate, collaborate and cooperate with one another to coordinate their work. They have done interviews, observations and surveys to discover the pain points of coordination, and learn about the tactics teams use to get their inter-team work successfully completed.

Microsoft and Brown University have collaborated to create Debugger Canvas, a free Power Tool that adds Code Bubbles™ to Visual Studio for a new way to debug.

Several groups in MSR have studied geographically-distributed software development using empirical methods or built tools to support distributed teams.

Do you have a remote teammate? Is it hard for them to participate fully in meetings? Is it hard for you to keep track of what they're up to — and vice versa? An Embodied Social Proxy is a device to represent the remote person in the team's space. During a meeting it acts as a videoconferencing head, effectively giving the remote person a seat at the table. While idle, it shows the remote's recent activity, such as check-ins, bug edits, and status changes.

Several groups in MSR are studying software engineering process and products using empirical methods. The methods range from statistical analysis of software repositories to observations of programmers at work.

Several researchers in MSR have used a human-centered approach to develop tools to support software engineers and teams.

Knowledge of a software development project is embedded both in the repositories (source code, bug database, etc.) and in the engineers' heads. Understanding how this knowledge moves between engineers is crucially important to understanding how software gets built.

One of the recurring themes that we have in the HIP group is that we may be able to use spatial memory to augment the software development experience.