Microsoft Research Projects of Interest – Spatial and Sociological Code Representations

Microsoft has a number of great groups at the MSR and a lot of interesting projects. I am nearly done with my PhD and am looking for possible opportunities at various research labs and groups. In this series of posts, I am going to briefly summarize interesting projects select for MSR researcher and post-doc positions.

Spatial and Sociological Code Representations

Code Canvas houses editable forms of all of a projects documents and allows multiple layers of visualization over these documents. Developers often get interrupted from their work and when they return, they have to search/reorder all the concerned documents before beginning the actual work. The premise behind code canvas is that uniting the content and meta-content of a project onto a single surface it is possible to enable developers to leverage their spatial memory while coding. Other spatial projects include the use of spatial representations of development documents to allow developers to use spatial memory to find them.

Like spatial code representation, there are projects like Knowledge Flow that utilize sociological knowledge of a software development project — relation between the repositories (source code, bug database, etc.) and the engineers’ heads. Similarly, Codebook is a platfrom that uses a social networking-inspired approach to connect artifacts and people in software repositories. The premise behind these projects is that understanding the relation between actual code and what’s going on between the developers as they interact to develop a project can help in identifying how the project is taking shape. This will enable management to identify and affect better coordination and performance of developers.