SHF: Medium: Combining Speculation with Continuous Validation for Software Developers

多核处理器和云计算提供了前所未有的计算能力。迄今为止，这种能力主要用于使程序运行得更快。然而，在许多情况下，解决用户问题的瓶颈在于创建软件的挑战，而不是运行它的时间。这个项目将把计算能力应用于真正的瓶颈，为开发人员提供新型的反馈。作为一个关键的更广泛的影响，这项研究将使开发人员能够更快、更便宜、更高质量地开发软件。关键的技术理念是提前告知开发人员他们可能采取的行动的后果。开发环境推测开发人员的操作，评估每个操作的影响（在编译、测试、版本控制冲突等方面），并且不显眼地将这些信息提供给开发人员。通过了解哪些选择是好的，哪些是坏的，开发人员可以避免花费时间或降低质量的坏选择。该项目的智力优点包括快速创建和评估许多可能的开发人员操作的算法，开发人员意识的UI设计，以及评估关于可能的操作的偶然信息的增加如何影响开发人员。这也引出了一个问题的答案：如果开发人员拥有无限的处理能力，那么还会存在哪些基本的软件工程研究问题？

Unprecedented computational power is available from multi-core processors and cloud computing. To date, this power has been used primarily to make programs run faster. However, in many cases the bottleneck to solving users' problems is in the challenge of creating the software, not in the time to run it. This project will apply computational power to the real bottleneck, providing developers with new types of feedback. As a key broader impact, the research will enable developers to create software more quickly, more cheaply, and with higher quality.The key technical idea is to inform developers, in advance, of the consequences of their likely actions. The development environment speculates about developer actions, evaluates the effect of each action (on compilation, tests, version control conflicts, etc.), and unobtrusively makes this information available to the developer. By knowing which choices are good and which are bad, developers can avoid bad choices that cost time or reduce quality. The project's intellectual merits include algorithms to quickly create and evaluate many possible developer actions, UI design for developer awareness, and evaluation of how increased awareness of contingent information, about possible actions, affects developers. This also leads toward an answer to the question: If developers had infinite processing power, what fundamental software engineering research problems would remain?