June 2011 - Bertrand Meyer's technology+ blog

Agile methods: the good, the bad and the ugly

17 April 201427 June 2011 by Bertrand Meyer

Agile methods are wonderful. They’ll give you software in no time at all, turn your customers and users into friends, catch bugs before they catch you, change the world, and boost your love life.

Concurrent programming is easy

17 April 201420 June 2011 by Bertrand Meyer

Concurrent programming raises very hard problems. But the difficulty should be for the implementers of a concurrency model, not the application programmers. This article discusses concurrency challenges and presents the new SCOOP implementation which targets them.

Incremental research again

17 April 201420 June 2011 by Bertrand Meyer

After some updating, I republished in the Communications of the ACM blog my discussion of the value of incremental research, which first appeared as an article here .

Assessing concurrency models

17 April 201412 June 2011 by Bertrand Meyer

In a recent experiment with students we wanted to know how the SCOOP concurrency model compares to Java Threads in terms of ease of learning, program readability and correctness. Our group, however, is heavily involved with SCOOP. How did we address the risk of bias, and other parts of the “Professor Smith Syndrome”? What are our results, and can you believe them?

The Professor Smith syndrome: Part 2

17 April 20146 June 2011 by Bertrand Meyer

How can we perform meaningful empirical software engineering studies in a university, using students? This post describes four major mistakes, some affecting the credibility of such a study, and one an ethical flaw.

The Professor Smith syndrome: Part 1 – a quiz

17 April 20142 June 2011 by Bertrand Meyer

[As a reminder, this blog is now on a regular schedule, appearing every Monday. Sometimes in mid-week there will be a lighter piece or, as here, a preparation for the following Monday’s entry.] Consider the following hypothetical report in experimental software engineering (see earlier posts: [1], [2]): Professor Smith has developed a new programming technique, … Read more