Bertrand Meyer

See http://bertrandmeyer.com/about

Why stop at pronouns?

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My adjectives: timid, arrogant, insufferable. My adverbs: (just one in fact) inadvertently My gerunds: painstaking, running away, whining My verbs: irritate, disappoint My prepositions: notwithstanding, in spite of, away from My conjunction: even though




A problem child?

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The latest issue of the New York Review of Books contains a book review by George Stauffer about Alban Berg with this bewildering sentence about Berg’s childhood: He showed few signs of musical talent as a youth aside from informal piano lessons, reading through the scores of songs and operas, and playing four-hand arrangements of … Read more




One way to become a top scientist…

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… is to have a top scientist spot your talent and encourage you, however humble your status may be then. Wikipedia has a terse entry about Dirk Rembrandtsz (with “sz” at the end), presented as a “seventeenth-century Dutch cartographer, mathematician, surveyor, astronomer, teacher and [religious dignitary]” with “more than thirty scientific publications to his name” … Read more




PhD and postdoc positions in verification in Switzerland

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The Chair of Software Engineering, my group at the Schaffhausen Institute of Technology in Switzerland (SIT), has open positions for both PhD students and postdocs. We are looking for candidates with a passion for reliable software and a mix of theoretical knowledge and practical experience in software engineering. Candidates should have degrees in computer science … Read more




Panel on methodology and agility, this Monday (20 September)

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Today (well, tomorrow as of writing, but when you see this it will probably be today for you) I am participating in a panel discussion with Ivar Jacobson, Robert Martin and Carlos Zapata on “The Future of Methods”, hosted by the SEMAT/Essence movement. It takes place at 18:30 CET (i.e. Paris/Zurich etc.), 12:30 EDT, 9:30 … Read more




A standard plan for modern requirements

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Requirements documents for software projects in industry, agile or not, typically follow a plan defined in a 1998 IEEE standard (IEEE 830-1998 [1]),  “reaffirmed” in 2009. IEEE 830 has the merit of simplicity, as it fits in 37 pages of which just a few (competently) describe basic requirements concepts and less than 10 are devoted to … Read more




Publication announcement: survey on requirements techniques, formal and non-formal

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There is a new paper out, several years in the making: The Role of Formalism in System Requirements Jean-Michel Bruel, Sophie Ebersold, Florian Galinier, Manuel Mazzara, Alexander Naumchev, Bertrand Meyer Computing Surveys (ACM), vol. 54, no. 5, June 2021, pages 1-36 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3448975 Preprint available here. The authors are from the Schaffhausen Institute of Technology … Read more




On beauty and software (online talk on Wednesday, 17 CET / 11 EDT / 8 PDT)

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This Wednesday (still “tomorrow” as I am writing this), 10 March 2021, I am giving a talk on “The Beauty of Software” on the occasion of the graduation ceremony of the first students of the Schaffhausen Institute of Technology. The event starts at 17 Schaffhausen/Zurich/Paris etc. time (11 AM New York, 8 AM San Francisco) … Read more




Tomorrow (Thursday) noon EDT: ACM talk on requirements

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In the software engineering family requirements engineering is in my experience the poor cousin, lagging behind the progress of other parts (such as design). I have been devoting attention to the topic in recent months and am completing a book on the topic. Tomorrow (Thursday), I will be covering some of the material in a … Read more