Developer Productivity Engineering in the Complex Low-Level Systems World

About this talk

Software systems powering OS kernels, basebands, bootloaders, firmware, IoT or automotive build the foundation of infrastructure that billions of people rely on every day. Developing and maintaining such systems is challenging as they usually consist of a very large number of source files, have multiple configurations, hundreds of modules and various custom build steps. Therefore, tools that help engineers navigate through the growing complexity of low-level systems are highly desirable.

In this talk, we present various developer productivity engineering (DPE) techniques that we developed and used in the last few years to ensure high performance and effectiveness of engineers working on the system layer of the OS. The cornerstone of these techniques is our novel Code Aware Services (CAS) toolchain which opens up new possibilities for DPE-related applications.

CAS is a set of tools for extracting information from the build process and the source code. This includes data such as how a particular software image is created or information on functions, types and dependencies across them. CAS makes this data easily accessible to external applications.

In the talk, we will first present core components of CAS: low-overhead build tracer module, clang-based source code processor and Python libraries used for application development. Then, we will talk about selected DPE techniques and tools developed on top of CAS.

One DPE tool we will present is Build Awareness Service: a system which provides detailed information acquired during the full build of a product. We will demonstrate how this information could be used to improve various aspects of S/W Engineer’s job:

• Better code search and IDE indexing enhancements
• Using build-related data to automate various S/W related operations, e.g. generate custom Makefiles for partial/incremental builds or fine-grained static analysis, provide process visualization, build dependency analysis, execution time measurements etc.