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Microsoft shifts 70 researchers to software work

By Brier Dudley
Seattle Times technology reporter

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The move comes as the company is in the midst of an enormous effort to produce the next generation of Windows, code-named Longhorn, while trying to improve its development process and overcome security and reliability issues with its products.

The new group, the Center for Software Excellence, will create software tools and manage systems that check newly written code for bugs. It will also contribute to the Visual Studio programming toolkit that goes on sale next year.

Microsoft announced the group yesterday at its research division's annual "Faculty Summit," which drew 400 professors from 135 schools in 20 countries to Redmond.

Faculty come to learn about Microsoft's upcoming technology, share ideas and hear from Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates and others.

Microsoft has a complicated relationship with academia. It draws on scholarly research and shares some of its own research via published papers and conferences. The company also cultivates support for its products by providing schools with software, grants and curriculum.

Yesterday, the company made other announcements aimed at strengthening the relationship. It created a more formal process for awarding grants and a $1 million endowment program to support computer-science professors' research.

Rick Rashid, a former professor who has run the research group in 1991, said its funding will increase about 7 percent in the coming year. That includes the addition of 50 researchers to its staff of 700 based at labs in Redmond; Beijing; Cambridge, England; and the Bay Area.

Gates and Rashid discussed concerns about the amount of government support for computer and science education, and declining enrollment in graduate computer-science programs.

Gates also told a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor he has concerns about students graduating with solid programming skills. "We're finding we have to do a lot of work with undergraduates," he said.

Gates also talked about progress in making software.
 
"The place you're visiting in a sense is the world's largest software factory," he said. "We constantly try and make this factory more and more productive and, of course, it's the tools of software that will allow us to do that.

"We spend a lot of time looking at where do these bugs come from, why do we have to write this much code, why do we need testers to do these various things, and I think we are on the verge of some pretty substantial advances," Gates said.

Highlighted yesterday were testing tools the Center for Software Excellence will administer.

Several of the quality-check tools already are mandatory and must be used whenever a Microsoft developer hands in new code.

The group is headed by Amitabh Srivastava, one of the company's distinguished engineers. In 1999, he created the research division's Programmer Productivity Research Center.

Srivastava moved to Windows about six months ago, and 70 other researchers moved last month to create the Center for Software Excellence. Twenty-five others remained at the productivity center.

"If we really want to take our (work) to the next level, we need those guys sitting side by side with the developers," said Kevin Schofield, the research group's general manager for strategy and communications.

Generally, researchers who move to product groups are replaced with new staff, but it was unclear yesterday how many of the 70 will be replaced.

Brier Dudley: 206-515-5687 or bdudley@seattletimes.com