Research

Software development is increasingly being viewed as a commodity, however the IT industry is simply too young and immature for that to be effective. Mainstream software development is still predominantly a craft where there are significant productivity and quality differences between developers at similar experience levels. When any one of the currently popular programming languages (e.g. Java, C#) is utilised, there are usually unrecognised costs due to the increased complexity introduced, over and above that of the software requirements.

Workingmouse endeavours to contribute to the continued improvement of the software development discipline. We would love to see software projects delivered with less effort and in shorter timeframes that are more robust, usable, maintainable and extendable. To this end, we are interested in reducing the extra complexity that our current mainstream languages, tools and architectures currently impose.

Some of the specific areas we focus on are:

• Design principles/paradigms, such as OO
• Imperative vs Functional programming styles
• Type Systems
• Alternative programming languages: Haskell, O'Caml, Clean, Scala, F#
• The formation of high performance development teams

Please see our wiki for publicly available projects.