Large-scale software development requires coordination between engineering teams who may be located in different buildings, different corporate campuses, and in different time zones. Christopher Poile, Andrew Begel, Lucas Layman and Nachi Nagappan studied a 3-year-old software application team at Microsoft to learn how they coordinate with three dependent teams, one co-located in Redmond, one in Boston, MA and the third in Hyderabad, India. We found that coordination was most affected by communication, capacity and cooperation. Distributed teams suffered the same problems as co-located teams, but problems caused by time zone and culture were magnified./p>

New college graduates experience many struggles during their first six months in a software development position. Andrew Begel and Beth Simon from the University of California at San Diego conducted a two-month long study of eight newly hired developers to Microsoft to identify how they learned the code, tools, processes, procedures, and social network in their new jobs. We found that developers know how to program, design, and debug, but have trouble with tools, metacognition and orientation in large, legacy codebases, and face many difficulties with communication and social skills.

Backstory is an application that you can use to help you with search tasks, by providing two capabilities: (1) simultaneous search across multiple data sources, and (2) workflow support for multi-query investigations. See this web page for more information.

Codifier is a programmer-centric search tool that enables software developers to ask some domain-specific questions related to programming languages and software. For example, developers might use Codifier to find out where an API is defined or used, or where the assignments to a variable are. They should still be able to find it, even if they do not know how it is spelled or even remember exactly how it was named. See our HCIR paper for more information. what it is called.

In the summer of 2006, Gina Venolia and Mauro Cherubini ran a series of surveys and interviews on why and how developers use visual depictions of their code. We found that diagrams that documented design decisions were often externalized in the temporary drawings and then subsequently lost. Most of the diagrams had a transient nature because of the high cost of changing whiteboard sketches to electronic renderings. Current visualization tools and the software development practices that we observed do not solve these issues, but these results suggest several directions for future research. [CHI 2007]

In the summer of 2006, Rob DeLine and Andy Ko observed seventeen developers and transcribed their activities minute by minute in 90 minute sessions. We analyzed these logs for the information that developers sought, the sources that they used, and the situations that prevented information from being acquired. We identify twenty-one information types and catalog the outcome and source when each type of information was sought. The most frequently sought information included awareness about artifacts and coworkers. The most often deferred searches included knowledge about design and program behavior, such as why code was written a particular way, what a program was supposed to do, and the cause of a program state. Developers often had to defer tasks because the only sources of knowledge were unavailable coworkers. [ICSE 2007 paper]

Modern development environments provide many features for navigating source code, yet recent studies show the developers still spend a tremendous amount of time just navigating. Since existing navigation features rely heavily on memorizing symbol names, we present a new design, called Code Thumbnails, intended to allow a developer to navigate source code by forming a spatial memory of it. To aid intra-file navigation, we add a thumbnail image of the file to the scrollbar, which makes any part of the file one click away. To aid interfile navigation, we provide a desktop of file thumbnail images, which make any part of any file one click away. We did a formative evaluation of the design with eleven experienced developers and present the results. [VL/HCC paper]

As a human-centered effort, we draw from various research fields including human-computer interaction, information visualization, computer-supported cooperative work, and social computing. The central tenet of these fields is that one needs to understand the user's needs in order to design tools to support them. This technical report describes our initial investigation (from July 2005) into the needs and practices of software development at Microsoft.

In October 2006, we conducted a survey to learn how Agile development is practiced at Microsoft. We learned what Agile methodologies are used, the distribution of practice penetration within various product groups, and what Microsoft engineers perceived to Agile's benefits and problems. [ESEM 07 paper]

There are myriad ways that a system could detect relationships between code-related artifacts - static analysis, analysis of check-ins, observing navigation sequences, etc. Our goal is to build a common representation for the artifacts and relationships and then use these data structures to improve code-related search and recommender systems. See this white paper for more information.

Team Tracks helps developers learn unfamiliar source code by mining data about where the development team navigates in the code as they go about their daily programming activities. Team Tracks is based on two insights: the more often developers visit a part of the code, the more important it is; and the more often developers visit two parts of the code in succession, the more related they are. To help a newcomer quickly find the most important parts of the code, Team Tracks limits the code overviews (like the list of projects and files and the class hierarchy) to the most frequently visited items. To help a newcomer find code related to the definition currently being edited, Team Tracks recommends parts of the code visited just before or after that definition (at right). In a controlled lab study, we've shown that Team Tracks significantly improves a developer's ability to perform updates to unfamiliar code. [VL/HCC paper and presentation] [SoftVis 05 paper and presentation]

As experienced developers navigate around unfamiliar code, they often become disoriented. Indeed, in a recent observation study, we even saw a participant not recognize a method he had visited just a minute beforehand. It would be great if source code had a sense of "place" that would allow us to use our spatial memory when navigating, just as we do when navigating physical terrains. Software Terrain Maps are a prototype visualization based on the metaphor of cartographic maps, which are continuous (no wasted space), have enough visual landmarks to allow the viewer to recognize locations perceptually rather than cognitively, and lend themselves to data overlay. [VLC 05 paper][VLC05 presentation]