077r - The productive software engineer with Dr. Tom Zimmermann

This episode originally aired in May, 2019. If you’re in software development, Dr. Tom Zimmermann, a senior researcher at Microsoft Research in Redmond, wants you to be more productive, and he’s here to help. How, you might ask? Well, while productivity can be hard to measure, his research in the Empirical Software Engineering group is attempting to do just that by using insights from actual data, rather than just gut feelings, to improve the software development process. On today’s podcast, Dr. Zimmermann talks about why we need to rethink productivity in software engineering, explains why work environments matter, tells us how AI and machine learning are impacting traditional software workflows, and reveals the difference between a typical day and a good day in the life of a software developer, and what it would take to make a good day typical!