Business Intelligence for Software Understanding

Speaker

Title

Abstract

What makes a great piece of code? Who writes that great code? Are there areas where they could do better, say in using the concurrency API? Objective answers require data analysis; the available data include the source code itself, issue tickets, version history, test results and so forth.

Semmle is a business intelligence platform for doing such data analysis. I’ll show three different views of the analysis results: one to highlight the quality of individual contributions, another to zoom in on areas of the code that are at risk of failure, and finally an interface for power users to create custom analyses. Each view will be illustrated with a high-profile open source project.

Underneath the Semmle platform is a modern implementation of object-oriented Datalog that executes complex queries on heterogeneous data at blazing speed.

Bio

Oege de Moor is the CEO of Semmle. He is also a professor at the University of Oxford, where he leads the Programming Languages research theme.