The Shape of Code

Active directory sits at the center of the Microsoft corporate product line, providing identity related services. All the Microsoft services use it to figure out what users can and cannot do. Ensuring it was possible for third parties to implement Active Directory was on the must-do task list during the compliance phase of the EU/Microsoft competition case.

With the LinkedIn purchase Microsoft has acquired the base from which to implement Active Directory for companies operating in the cloud; the identity service used by companies to monitor employees looks like it will continue to be owned and operated by Microsoft.

People have been known to be inventive when writing their cvs and LinkedIn profiles are unlikely to be any different. How do Microsoft introduce some quality control to the claims appearing in profiles?

One way of verifying the claims made by software developers, about what projects they have worked on and how much they contributed, is to look at the code they have written. If Microsoft owned GitHub they would be in a position to do just that, starting with its 14 million users.

What you know a developers employment history and the code they wrote, all sorts of services can be offered. Companies are rightly concerned about the intellectual property of the software they produce and use. Microsoft would be in a position to provide a code IP checking service, the code produced by company employees could be compared against the code they wrote at previous companies to produce a similarity value. This checking option can be sold to all companies in a developer’s work history; companies want to know that when an employee leaves they don’t take anything with them.

Technical details. You would be correct to point out that quantity of code written is not a sensible predictor of developer productivity. Not a problem when selling to management, there are enough academic studies associating quantity with productivity to make management believe otherwise.

Microsoft don’t actually need to see the source code to perform a lot of similarity checks. Many clone detection tools work by comparing hashes of small sequences of particular code features; comparing constructs.