How do you improve the behavior of a software team? There will always be team members who are great at quickly producing a new prototype, and others who do a great job of carefully implementing a rock-solid library around a set of new data structures. By analyzing every single contribution of every individual over a long period of time, we can start to understand such differences in coding style. Individuals get suggestions on how to improve their own style, and team leaders can build on everyone’s strength to maximize productivity.

Semmle’s business intelligence product enables this type of detailed analysis of version history, source code, issue tickets, test results and so forth. I will discuss how the technical challenges were overcome, and also the organizational implications.

Biography

Oege de Moor is the CEO of Semmle Ltd. He started his career in programming in 1982 with the development of a word processor for Arabic and Hebrew. After an undergraduate degree in computer Science at Utrecht (the Netherlands), he did his graduate work at Oxford. At present he is a professor of computer science there, and a fellow of Magdalen College. He has held visiting appointments at Chalmers University (Sweden), the University of Tokyo (Japan), and Microsoft Research (Redmond and Cambridge).