Scientists at the University of Essex are looking to the business community to help take their exciting new software development technology one step closer to going commercial.

The team from the School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering has secured funding for a week-long pilot of their Two-Tier Programming (TTP) Toolkit and are now looking for an industrial setting to conduct the study.

When the prototype of the Toolkit was recently tested in a controlled experiment, the scientists were amazed to find that Java programmers not only performed 76 per cent faster in development and maintenance tasks but also almost tripled their accuracy levels after receiving only one hour training.

Dr Amnon Eden said that, considering the major expense businesses face with software development and maintenance, the approach taken by the Toolkit stands to change the nature of software development.

With the potential to be used by up to 50 per cent of programmers globally, including Java C++ and C# programmers, the TTP Toolkit could have a major impact on the commercial sector.

Notis Gasparis, who is leading the project, added that the beauty of the TTP Toolkit - a visualization and automated design verification prototype - was its different approach to finding and solving software design faults.

The team at the University are now hoping to find a company with a sufficiently large Java code base (open-source, imported or proprietary) to test the TTP Toolkit in a real-life scenario to back up its claims over the productivity gains it can deliver in software development tasks.

‘Our goal is a week-long test and the purpose is to improve their process. Their gain is our gain.’ explained Dr Eden. ‘The TTP Toolkit is still a prototype, but this week-long test is the next step towards making it a commercial product.’

Companies interested in taking part in the study can contact Dr Eden via email at eden@essex.ac.uk

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