Software developers primarily rely on experience and intuition to make development decisions. I will describe speculative analysis, a new technique that helps developers make better decisions by informing them of the consequences of their likely actions.

As a concrete example, I will consider collaborative development and the conflicts that arise when developers make changes in parallel. This is a serious problem. In industry, some companies hire developers solely to resolve conflicts. In open-source development, my historical analysis of over 140,000 versions of nine systems revealed that textual, compilation, and behavioral conflicts are frequent and persistent, posing a significant challenge to collaborative development. Speculative analysis can help solve this problem by informing developers early about potential and existing conflicts. Armed with this information, developers can prevent or more easily resolve the conflicts. I will demonstrate Crystal, a publicly available tool that detects such conflicts early and precisely. Crystal has inspired a collaboration with Microsoft and some Microsoft teams now use a version of the tool in their everyday work.

My research focuses on helping developers understand system behavior. By informing developers of the consequences of their choices, speculative analysis allows developers to understand the choices' implications on the system’s behavior, leading to better decisions and higher-quality software. I will briefly describe three other results that help developers understand system behavior and then summarize my vision of how the mechanisms that inform developers can also be used to inform the system itself, allowing for self-adapting and self-managing systems.