Bertrand Meyer's technology+ blog

This article is meant as a blog but was written as a standard text and I haven’t had the time to HTML-ize yet. So I am just providing an abstract below, and linking to a PDF which gives the details. The PDF is here.

The purpose is simple: start a community project. The description is prospective only and does not claim to describe a finished product. While simple, the idea is ambitious: define the field of software engineering through a formal theory. Unfortunately, much formal methods work) is axiom- and definition-rich and theorem-poor. Here, the goal is to produce the exact reverse: a good theory that starts with a minimal set of definitions and axioms, and tries to derive as many laws as possible.

Here is the abstract of the article:

Software engineering concepts and processes are worthy of formal study; and yet we seldom formalize them. This  article explores what a theory of software engineering could and should look like.

Software engineering research has developed formal techniques of specification and verification as an application of mathematics to specify and verify systems addressing needs of various application domains. These domains usually do not include the domain of software engineering itself. It is, however, a rich domain with many processes and properties that cry for formalization and potential verification.

This article outlines the structure of a possible theory of software engineering in the form of an object-oriented model, isolating abstractions corresponding to fundamental software concepts of project, milestone, code module, test and other staples of our field, and their mutual relationships. While the presentation is only a sketch of the full theory, it provides a set of guidelines for how a comprehensive and practical Theory of Software Engineering should (through an open-source community effort) be developed.

Please write to the author if you are interested in participating. The link to the PDF of the article again: here.

Be Sociable, Share!

• 
•