Bertrand Meyer's technology+ blog
Software engineering, programming methodology, languages, verification, general technology, publication culture, and more
Bertrand Meyer Software engineering has improved a lot in the past couple of decades, but there remains an area where the old doomsday style of starting a software engineering paper (software crisis, everything is rotten…) still fits: requirements engineering. Just see the chasm between textbook advice and the practice of most projects. I have written on requirements … Read more
December 16 (next Monday), the newly created Schaffhausen Institute of Technology organizes an entire day of events around three (no less) talks by the physics Nobel prize winner and MIT professor Wolfgang Ketterle. The culmination of the day is a talk by Prof. Ketterle in the evening on “What happened to the kilogram?”. From the … Read more
Some important concepts of software engineering, established over the years, are not widely known in the community. One use of this blog is to provide tutorials on such overlooked ideas. An earlier article covered one pertaining to project management: the Shortest Possible Schedule property . Here is another, this time in the area of requirements engineering, … Read more
Sign seen in a Singapore shopping center: Let us make sure we understand: here children are not allowed, but playing is. As a consequence such playing must be performed by non-children only. Adults welcome to play! Maybe it is actually not the intended meaning. Instead of (and (not (allowed children)) (allowed playing)) the desired … Read more
The 2020 LASER summer school has been announced. It will take place June 1 to 6* , as always in Elba Island, this year with the theme DevOps, Microservices and Software Development for the Age of the Web. The first five speakers are listed on the conference page, with more to come, from both academia … Read more
Earlier this year I was in Sofia for a conference, at the main university (Saint Kliment) which in the entrance hall had an exhibition about its history. There was this student poster and song from I think around 1900: I like the banner (what do you think?). It even has the correct Latin noun … Read more
The best way to make software requirements precise is to use one of the available “formal” approaches. Many have been proposed; I am not aware of a general survey published so far. Over the past two years, we have been working on a comprehensive survey of the use of formality in requirements, of which we … Read more
Recently I had a need to collect my education-related publications, so I went through my publication list and extracted items devoted to issues of learning computer science (informatics) and software engineering. There turned out to be far more than I expected; I did not think of myself as primarily an education researcher but it seems … Read more
Some of the folk wisdom going around in software engineering, often cluessly repeated for decades, is just wrong. It can be particularly damaging when it affects key aspects of software development and is contradicted by solid scientific evidence. The present discussion covers a question that meets both of these conditions: whether it makes sense to … Read more