About
Welcome. My name is Thomas “TomZ” Zimmermann and since November 2008, I am a Sr. Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research in Seattle, USA. I received my PhD from Saarland University in Saarbrücken, Germany.
My research focuses on improving programmer productivity and I developed techniques and tools that make both managers and developers aware of history. Learning from past successes and failures will help us to create better software.
Featured content
The productive software engineer with Dr. Tom Zimmermann
Episode 77, May 22, 2019- If you’re in software development, Dr. Tom Zimmermann, a senior researcher at Microsoft Research in Redmond, wants you to be more productive, and he’s here to help. How, you might ask? Well, while productivity can be hard to measure, his research in the Empirical Software Engineering group is attempting to do just that by using insights from actual data, rather than just gut feelings, to improve the software development process. On today’s podcast, Dr. Zimmermann talks about why we need to rethink productivity in software engineering, explains why work environments matter, tells us how AI and machine learning are impacting traditional software workflows, and reveals the difference between a typical day and a good day in the life of a software developer, and what it would take to make a good day typical!