Coping at the Scale of Mozilla: How Mozilla uses Open Tools to Manage Complexity

Presenter(s): 
Room Location: 
S1206
Time: 
Fri, 2009-10-30 13:00

Large-scale software development is hard, and hard on a scale that is difficult for individual developers to overcome. As software grows, an individual developer's ability to make changes diminishes. At Mozilla we have long known this, and as the need to evolve our multi-million line codebase grew, it was clear that new methods were needed to cope with change at this scale. Mozilla pioneered the development of open tools and processes that extend the developer's leverage over large codebases. Our static analysis tools allow us to extract information, guard against difficult bugs being introduced, refactor and change large amounts of existing code, etc. In this talk we will examine and demonstrate how two such tools, Dehydra and DXR, are changing the way that software on the scale of Mozilla gets built.