Lab Work

So Monday, yesterday was labwork.
I was introduced by my wonderful tutor, Raula,
who also met us at the airport Sunday
to what the lab is currently working on.

Everything sounds great.
Sounds like all the things I was wishing for
since doing software development.

He's doing Program Slicing, not as an end in its own,
but as a way to correlate reported bugs in the
bug-tracking tool to the actual bug, trying to determine
bug complexity (how much it spaghettis (new verb) with the rest of the code)
with the length of time to close a bug.

There are some problems with this due
to again, the human factor.
Since if the bug tracking tool is not updated correctly,
the data is shot.

Introduced me to CodeSurfer and
by Monday I had a grasp of what the tool could do,
had successully built a project for one open source repository.
I don't think I have accomplished much,
and I want to learn more,
especially about the other research work.

But this tool has opened my eyes to the many possibilities
we can do with it. Not just bug correlation,
but the obvious, as a productivity tool. In our company we do a lot
of maintenance and debugging. Probably eats up 70% of our time,
I would say. Time for a new recruit to get up to speed is 6 months,
usually even more. Cause you have to have the whole system
in your head. This tool will eliminate, or maybe lessen that requirement
and make it easier to get up to speed in a shorter time frame.

And of course, quality code. That;s the whole point really.
It's not just for post-mortem. It has very big potential for
before implementation.

The other interesting thing is documentation. Everyone hates documentation.

Using this sort of tool to get requirements back, that's wonderful,
automatic documentation, perfect. Just a dream.