New LASER proceedings






Springer has just published in the tutorial sub-series of Lecture Notes in Computer Science a new proceedings volume for the LASER summer school [1]. The five chapters are notes from the 2008, 2009 and 2010 schools (a previous volume [2] covered earlier schools). The themes range over search-based software engineering (Mark Harman and colleagues), replication … Read more




ERC Advanced Investigator Grant: Concurrency Made Easy






We have just been awarded an ERC Advanced Investigator Grant project on concurrent programming (2.5 M EUR). This article is a brief introduction to the project and a first announcement of the positions (postdocs, phds, engineer) for which we will be advertising.







PhD position: concurrent programming (SCOOP) for robotics






The ETH Chair of Software Engineering has won a grant from the Hasler foundation, in a joint project with the Technical University of Lucerne and the Autonomous Systems Lab of ETH, to develop a robotics framework involving concurrent computation. The project, called Roboscoop,  will produce a demonstrator system: a “SmartWalker” robot — a robotic version … Read more




Agile methods: the good, the bad and the ugly






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.







Assessing concurrency models






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?