Short Bio

Brendan Murphy is a Senior Researcher at Microsoft Research Centre in Cambridge UK. Brendan works in the Empirical Software Engineering and Measurement (ESM) activities in Microsoft focusing on software reliability, dependability, quality and process issues.

Prior to his current position at Microsoft, Brendan was at Compaq Corporation (previously Digital), Ayr Scotland till August 1999, where he ran the DPP program which collected and analyzed dependability data from customer sites. Prior to working in Scotland, Brendan worked for Digital in Galway Ireland, UNISYS (Scotland and US) and ICL (West Gorton, Manchester).

Brendan graduated from Newcastle University. In his free time you can find him playing golf in and around Cambridge.

Research Interests

My research interests lie in the area of System Dependability which encompasses Measurement, Reliability and Availability. My areas of focus, using data currently available are:-

• Failure prediction.

Previous analysis of the data logged by applications identified burst of activity which appear to be indicative of potentially catastrophic problems. The focus of this work is now on failure predictions based on how the software is developed. Through analysing the profile of the software development it is possible to predict the ‘riskier’ software.

• Process and Product Measurement.

Developing metrics that characterize the way software systems are built. Prior work identified relationships between software development attributes and software quality. This work is being extended to identify the relationship between the software development process (people and tools) and software quality.

• System Fault Management architectures.

Fault management architectures have not advanced in the last 10 years but I believe opportunities exist in the area of

o NT management of hardware failures.

Traditionally operating systems manage hardware failures through a knowledge of the hardware architecture, resulting in versions of the OS being tied to specific hardware products. This method cannot be applied to NT whose interface to the hardware is through an abstraction layer resulting in the operating system being independent of the hardware. Therefore the challenge is to develop a management of hardware failures through this abstraction level (i.e. the best of both worlds).

o Total system fault architecture.

An architecture to manage hardware, operating system, application, cluster etc faults.

• Correlating the availability and reliability as perceived by the end users, against the application, cluster and nodal behaviour occurring on the server.

Current activities:

I serve on the steering committee of ISSRE (IEEE International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering). I also participate actively in the DSN community.

I was the general chair for ISSRE 2008 in Redmond/Seattle.

I serve on the editorial board for the Empirical Software Engineering journal.

Publications (selected)

^NEW Does Distributed Development Affect Software Quality? An Empirical Case Study of Windows Vista, Christian Bird, Nachiappan Nagappan, Premkumar Devanbu, Harald Gall and Brendan Murphy, To appear: International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2009), Vancouver, Canada.

Post-Release Reliability Growth in Software Products, Pankaj Jalote, Brendan Murphy, Vibhu Saujanya Sharma,  ACM Transactions on Software Engineering and Methodology (TOSEM), Volume 17, Number 4, pp. 1-20,  2008.

Can Developer-Module Networks Predict Failures?, Martin Pinzger, Nachiappan Nagappan, Brendan Murphy, ACM SIGSOFT International Symposium on the Foundations of Software Engineering, Atlanta, GA, 2008.

The Influence of Organizational Structure on Software Quality, Nachiappan Nagappan, Brendan Murphy, Victor Basili, International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE 2008), Leipzig, Germany, 2008.

Using Historical In-Process and Product Metrics for Early Estimation of Software Failures, Nagappan, N., Ball, T., Murphy, B., Proceedings of the International Symposium on Software Reliability Engineering, Raleigh, NC, 2006.

Structure From Failure, Ralf Herbrich, Thore Graepel, Brendan Murphy, Workshop on Tackling Computer Systems Problems with machine Learning Techniques (SysML 07).

Brendan Murphy; Automatic Software Failure Reporting (ftp://ftp.research.microsoft.com/pub/tr/TR-2004-143.doc ) ACM Queue Vol 2 No 8, Nov 2004.

Pankaj Jalote, Brendan Murphy; Reliability Growth Of Software Products (ftp://ftp.research.microsoft.com/pub/tr/TR-2004-144.pdf ) ISSRE 2004 St. Malo

Pankaj Jalote, Brendan Murphy, Mario Garzia, Ben Errez; Measuring Reliability Of Products (ftp://ftp.research.microsoft.com/pub/tr/TR-2004-145.pdf ) Supplementary Proceeding of ISSRE 2004 St. Malo

Older papers

Brendan Murphy, Ted Gent; Measuring System and Software Reliability Using an Automated Data Collection Process; Quality and Reliability Engineering International Volume 11, 341-353

Bjorn Levidow, Brendan Murphy; Windows 2000 Dependability (http://research.microsoft.com/research/pubs/view.aspx?msr_tr_id=MSR-TR-2000-56 )

Contact Information

Snail Mail: Brendan Murphy, 7 J J Thomson Avenue, Microsoft Research UK, Cambridge, UK CB3 0FB.

Email: /com/microsoft/bmurphy/