Essex University seeks business to advance commercial development of Java toolkit

Development opportunity

Researchers at the School of Computer Science and Electronic Engineering at Essex University, UK, have secured funding for a week-long pilot of their newly developed Two-Tier Programming (TTP) Toolkit and are now looking for an industrial setting to conduct the study.

When the prototype of the Toolkit was tested in a controlled experiment, Java programmers performed 76 per cent faster in development and maintenance tasks and almost tripled their accuracy levels, after receiving only one hour of training.

Researcher Amnon Eden claims that given the major expense of software development and maintenance, the approach taken by the Toolkit stands to change the nature of software development. It is potentially applicable to up to 50 per cent of programmers globally, including Java C++ and C# programmers.

Notis Gasparis, project leader, said TTP toolkit takes a novel approach to finding and solving software design faults, based on visualisation and automated design verification.

The team wants to find a company with a sufficiently large Java code base (either open-source, imported or proprietary), to test the TTP Toolkit in a real business environment and confirm the productivity gains it can deliver in software development.

“Our goal is a week-long test and the purpose is to improve [the testing company’s] process[es]. Their gain is our gain” said 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 Amnon Eden via email at [email protected].