[PRL] [Fwd: Be Blackburn] How to Get Annotations & Specifications into Industrial Code: Three easy lessons

[Mitchell Wand]

anybody gonna go and take notes?

--Mitch 

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Return-Path: <be at egret.lcs.mit.edu>
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From: Be Blackburn <be at theory.lcs.mit.edu>
To: toc at egret.lcs.mit.edu
Subject: How to Get Annotations & Specifications into Industrial Code: Three easy lessons
Date: Mon, 9 Jun 2003 12:01:19 -0400

TALK Friday, June 20th
Talk: How to Get Annotations and Specifications into 
      Industrial Code: Three easy lessons
Speaker: Daniel Weise, Senior Researcher, Microsoft Office
Host: Michael Ernst, LCS

Date:	06-20-2003
Time:   1:30 PM - 2:30 PM
Food:	1:15 PM
Where:  Room NE43-518

In response to necessity for more reliable products, Microsoft
development groups are rapidly moving towards code annotations and
domain specific checkers for those annotations. Yet common wisdom from
the academic community had it that you could never get developers to
annotate their code. How did this happen? 

This talk will cover the current state of code annotation and checking
technology at Microsoft, how we got developers to annotate code, and
where we are headed. As a specific example, I will also cover my
buffer overrun detector, which works surprisingly well because Office
has bought into a dependent type system (based on code annotation) in
an attempt to turn buffer overruns into type errors.

Bio:

Daniel Weise has advanced degrees from a respectable place (M.I.T.),
been faculty at a nearly respectable place (Stanford University), and
run a successful research group at a industrial place (Microsoft
Research) where his research group designed and built program analysis
technology that is having tremendous impact on the quality of
Microsoft products. In spite of his background, or maybe because of
it, he now insists on slumming in product groups because that's where
he believes the important action is, and that it's how to best effect
change and how to get the good ideas from research put into practice
and have research ideas informed by practice.  He has been championing
code annotation for three years from within the Office product group,
and this effort has paid off big time.

Relevant URL(S): 

For more information please contact: 
Neena Lyall, 617-253-6019
lyall at lcs.mit.edu 
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