Bertrand Meyer's technology+ blog

The European Software Engineering Conference takes place every two years in connection with the ACM Foundations of Software Engineering symposium (which in even years is in the US). The next ESEC/FSE  will be held for the first time in Russia, where it will be the first major international software engineering conference ever. It comes at a time when the Russian software industry is ever more present through products and services offered worldwide. See the conference site here. The main conference will be held 21-23 August 2013, with associated events before and after so that the full dates are August 18 to 26. (I am the general chair.)

Other than ICSE, ESEC/FSE is second to none in the quality of the program. We already have four outstanding keynote speakers:  Georges Gonthier from Microsoft Research, Paola Inverardi from L’Aquila in Italy, David Notkin from U. of Washington (in whose honor a symposium will be held as an associated event of ESEC/FSE, chaired by Michael Ernst), and Moshe Vardi of Rice and of course Communications of the ACM.

Saint Petersburg is one of the most beautiful cities in the world, strewn with gilded palaces, canals, world-class museums (not just the Hermitage), and everywhere mementos of the great poets, novelists, musicians and scientists who built up its fame.

Hosted by ITMO National Research University, the conference will be held in the magnificent building of the Razumovsky Palace on the banks of the Moika river; see here.

The Call for Papers has a deadline of March 1st, so there is still plenty of time to polish your best paper and send it to ESEC/FSE. There is also still time to propose worskhops and other associated events. ESEC/FSE will be a memorable moment for the community and we hope to see many of the readers there.

Here is a list of some presentations I am scheduled to give in the near future. Time for the faithful followers of this blog to start organizing groupie trips and get ready to haggle with the ticket scalpers and queue up at 3 AM for the best seats.

On May 9 I will give a talk in Paris, at Valtech, on the topic “Eiffel: Objects, Languages, Concurrency” [1]. It will be a general overview talk (in French) describing the key concepts of the Eiffel method and new developments.

On May 17 I will give a keynote at the Russian conference on IT education [2]. I haven’t sent a title and abstract yet but will talk about our experience of teaching introductory programming at ETH, now for 9 years, supported by the Touch of Class textbook which is now available in Russian. The talk itself will be in Russian.

On Tuesday, 29 May, I will give a keynote at TOOLS EUROPE in Prague [2]. This is the 50th TOOLS conference, a milestone, and I will talk on the theme of the conference, “The Triumph of Objects”, to assess the impact of object technology on the field of IT.

I am also giving a keynote at MSEPT (Multicore Software Engineering, Performance and Tools) the same week, on May 31. MSEPT [4] is co-located with TOOLS in Prague. The title of my presentation is “Concurrent Programming is Easy” and I will in particular present new developments in the SCOOP model and our first steps in the Concurrency Made Easy ERC Advanced Investigator Project. In addition I will be participating in two Eiffel-related workshops at TOOLS, WAVE on Advances in Verification for Eiffel, May 29 [5], where we are submitting several papers, and the third “Eiffel Web Design Feast” on May 30, part of a community project that is building an Eiffel-based Web development framework [6].

On June 5 I am giving an invited talk at the New Faculty Symposium of ICSE (International Conference on Software Engineering) in Zurich [7]. The title (assigned by the organizers) is “Promoting your ideas”. I did warn the organizers that this would be a contrarian talk as I find the current computer science publication culture in need of a reboot — this is the goal of the November Dagstuhl workshop mentioned below — but they said it was OK; I might even have heard the word “welcome” at some point.

On June 12 I will deliver a keynote at the International Conference on Reliable Software Technologies, also known as Ada-Europe, in Stockholm  [8]. The Ada community remains significant and is becoming interested in contracts, hence the subject of my talk: Life with Contracts. I will summarize the experience gained in applying Design by Contract as a core principle throughout development, and the next steps in developing the approach.

On June 24 I am  on one of the two panels at the Alan Turing Centenary Conference in Manchester [9]; the panel is entitled The Big Questions in Computation, Intelligence and Life.

In Seattle, 16-20 July, I look forward to presenting our latest verification ideas to the other members of the IFIP Working Group 2.3 on programming methodology [10]; this is the toughest and most unforgiving audience I know, but their feedback has always proved invaluable.

The next set of talks (apart from a possible presentation at the Snowbird conference in July, which I haven’t confirmed yet) is at our LASER summer school in Elba, September 2-8 [11], where I will deliver a set of lectures entitled Eiffel: a study in language design and evolution; it will be an in-depth discussion of issues that arise in devising a quality-focused programming language and managing its continued refinement over a long period, focusing on a few key design principles.

A few weeks later, on September 26, in Natal, I will present a keynote at the Brazilian software engineering conference, SBES [12]. I will talk about concurrency again, hoping of course to have new results to showcase by then.

Another event in which I am involved and expect to give a presentation is a Dagstuhl “Perspectives” workshop on the Publication Culture in Computer Science, November 6-9 [13]. The workshop was set up on the initiative of Moshe Vardi and I am one of the organizers. There is a widespread feeling that the publication model of computer science is broken; a number of articles in this blog have discussed the issues. At Dagstuhl we hope to be able to start fixing the process. Stay tuned.

References

[1] Talk at Valtech, 9 May 2012, information here.

[2] 10th All-Russian conference on IT education, Moscow, 16-18 May 2012, conference page here.

[3] TOOLS Europe 2012, Prague, 28 May – 1 June 2012, conference page here.

[4] MSEPT: International Conference on Multicore Software Engineering, Performance, and Tools, Prague, 31 May – June 1, 2012, conference page here.

[5] Workshop on Advances in Verification for Eiffel (WAVE), Prague, 29 May 2012, workshop page here.

[6] Eiffel Web Design Feast, Prague, 30 May 2012, call for participation available here.

[7] New Faculty Symposium at the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), Zurich, 5 June 2012, symposium page here.

[8] 17th International Conference on Reliable Software Technologies (Ada Europe 2012), Stockholm, 11-15 June 2012, conference page here.

[9] Alan Turing Centenary Conference, Manchester, 11-25 June 2012, conference page here.

[10] IFIP TC2-WG2.3 (Working group on Programming Methodology), group page here (meetings by invitation only).

[11] LASER summer school 2012, Innovative Languages for Software Engineering, 2-8 September 2012 (other speakers are Andrei Alexandrescu on D, Roberto Ierusalimschy on Lua, Ivar Jacobson on UML and SEMAT, Eric Meijer on C# and Linq, Martin Odersky on Scala, Simon Peyton-Jones on Haskell, and Guido van Rossum on Python; school page here.

[12] XXVI Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering (SBES), part of CBSoft (3rd Brazilian Conference on Software: Theory and Practice), Natal, 23-28 September 2012, symposium page here.

[13] Perspectives Workshop: Publication Culture in Computing Research (by invitation), Dagstuhl, 6-9 November 2012, workshop page here.

Workshop proposals are invited for TOOLS 2012, “The Triumph of Objects” tools.ethz.ch, to be held in Prague May 28 to June 1. TOOLS is a federated set of conferences:

• TOOLS EUROPE 2012: 50th International Conference on Objects, Models, Components, Patterns.
• ICMT 2012: 5th International Conference on Model Transformation.
• Software Composition 2012: 10th International Conference.
• TAP 2012: 6th International Conference on Tests And Proofs.
• MSEPT 2012: International Conference on Multicore Software Engineering, Performance, and Tools.

Workshops, which are normally one- or two-day long, provide organizers and participants with an opportunity to exchange opinions, advance ideas, and discuss preliminary results on current topics. The focus can be on in-depth research topics related to the themes of the TOOLS conferences, on best practices, on applications and industrial issues, or on some combination of these.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES

Submission proposal implies the organizers’ commitment to organize and lead the workshop personally if it is accepted. The proposal should include:

•  Workshop title.
• Names and short bio of organizers .
• Proposed duration.
•  Summary of the topics, goals and contents (guideline: 500 words).
•  Brief description of the audience and community to which the workshop is targeted.
• Plans for publication if any.
• Tentative Call for Papers.

Acceptance criteria are:

• Organizers’ track record and ability to lead a successful workshop.
•  Potential to advance the state of the art.
• Relevance of topics and contents to the topics of the TOOLS federated conferences.
•  Timeliness and interest to a sufficiently large community.

Please send the proposals to me (Bertrand.Meyer AT inf.ethz.ch), with a Subject header including the words “TOOLS WORKSHOP“. Feel free to contact me if you have any question.

DATES

•  Workshop proposal submission deadline: 17 February 2012.
• Notification of acceptance or rejection: as promptly as possible and no later than February 24.
• Workshops: 28 May to 1 June 2012.

Ever more people are realizing that concurrency is at the center of IT challenges for the next decades. Concurrent programming remains as hard as ever; we have put together a one-day seminar that helps understand the concepts and build successful concurrent applications. The sessions for the first few months of 2012 are:

• Palo Alto (February 15)
• Zurich, (March 2)
• London (March 22)
• Paris (May 10)
• Stockholm (June 15)
• Seattle (July 20)

and the seminar program is available here.

The program for ECSS 2011 (Milan, 7-9 November) has just been put online [1]. The European Computer Science Summit, held yearly since 2005, is the annual conference of Informatics Europe and a unique opportunity to discuss issues of interest to the computer science / informatics research and education community; much of the audience is made of deans, department heads, lab directors, researchers and senior faculty. Keynote speakers this year include Stefano Ceri, Mary Fernández, Monika Henzinger, Willem Jonker, Miron Livny, John Mylopoulos, Xavier Serra and John White.

ECSS is not a typical scientific conference; like Snowbird, its counterpart in the US, it is focused on professional and policy issues, and also a place to hear from technology leaders about their research visions. For me it is one of the most interesting events of the year.

References

[1] ECSS home page including advance program, here.

It was a bit imprudent last Monday to announce the continuation of the SCOOP discussion for this week; with the TOOLS conference happening now, with many satellite events such as the Eiffel Design Feast of the past week-end and today’s “New Eiffel Technology Community” workshop, there is not enough time for a full article. Next week might also be problematic. The SCOOP series will resume, but in the meantime I will report on other matters.

As something that can be conveniently typed in while sitting in the back of the TOOLS room during fascinating presentations, here is a bit of publicity for the next round of one-day seminars for industry — “Compact Course” is the official terminology — that I will be teaching at ETH in Zurich next November (one in October), some of them with colleagues. It’s the most extensive session that we have ever done; you can see the full programs and registration information here.

• Software Engineering for Outsourced and Distributed Development, 27 October 2011
  Taught with Peter Kolb and Martin Nordio

• Requirements Engineering, 17 November

• Software Testing and Verification: state of the art, 18 November
  With Carlo Furia and Sebastian Nanz

• Agile Methods: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly, 23 November

• Concepts and Constructs of Concurrent Computation, 24 November
  With Sebastian Nanz

• Design by Contract, 25 November

The agile methods course is new; its summary reads almost like a little blog article, so here it is.

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. Do you believe these claims (even excluding the last two)? It’s really difficult to form an informed opinion, since most of the presentations of eXtreme Programming and other agile practices are intended to promote them (and the consultants to whom they provide a living), not to deliver an objective assessment.

If you are looking for a guru-style initiation to the agile religion, this is not the course for you. What it does is to describe in detail the corpus of techniques covered by the “agile” umbrella (so that you can apply them effectively to your developments), and assess their contribution to software engineering. It is neither “for” nor “against” agile methods but fundamentally descriptive, pedagogical, objective and practical. The truth is that agile methods include some demonstrably good ideas along with some whose benefits are at best dubious. In addition (and this should not be a surprise) they cannot make the fundamental laws of software engineering go away.

Agile methods have now been around for more than a decade, during which many research teams, applying proven methods of experimental science, have performed credible empirical studies of how well the methods really work and how they compare to more traditional software engineering practices. This important body of research results, although not widely known, is critical to managers and developers in industry for deciding whether and how to use agile development. The course surveys these results, emphasizing the ones most directly relevant to practitioners.

A short discussion session will enable participants with experience in agile methods to share their results.

Taking this course will give you a strong understanding of agile development, and a clear view of when, where and how to apply them.

Schedule

Morning session: A presentation of agile methods

• eXtreme Programming, pair programming, Scrum, Test-Driven Development, continuous integration, refactoring, stakeholder involvement, feature-driven development etc.
• The agile lifecycle.
• Variants: lean programming etc.

Afternoon session (I): Assessment of agile methods

• The empirical software engineering literature: review of available studies. Assessment of their value. Principles of empirical software engineering.
• Agile methods under the scrutiny of empirical research: what helps, what harms, and what has no effect? How do agile methods fare against traditional techniques?
• Examples: pair programming versus code reviews; tests versus specifications; iterative development versus “Big Upfront Everything”.

Afternoon session (II): Discussion and conclusion

This final part of the course will present, after a discussion session involving participants with experience in agile methods, a summary of the contribution of agile methods to software engineering.

It will conclude with advice for organizations involved in software development and interested in applying agile methods in their own environment.

Target groups

CIOs; software project leaders; software developers; software testers and QA engineers.

In November of 2005, as part of the festivities of its 150-th anniversary, the ETH Zurich bestowed honorary doctorates on Don Knuth and Barbara Liskov. I gave the speech (the “laudatio”). It was published in Informatik Spektrum, the journal of Gesellschaft für Informatik, the German Computer Society, vo. 29, no. 1, February 2006, pages 74-76; I came across it recently and thought others might be interested in this homage to two great computer scientists.  The beginning was in German; I translated it into English. I also replaced a couple of German expressions by their translations: “ETH commencement” for ETH-Tag (the official name of the annual ceremony) and “main building” for Hauptgebäude.

I took this picture of Wirth, Liskov and Knuth (part of my gallery of computer scientists)  later that same day.

Laudatio

 In an institution, Ladies and Gentlement, which so proudly celebrates its hundred-and-fiftieth anniversary, a relatively young disciplines sometimes has cause for envy. We computer scientists are still the babies, or at least the newest kids on the block. Outside of this building, for example, you will see streets bearing such names as Clausius, yet there is neither a Von Neumann Lane nor a a Wirth Square. Youth, however,  also has its advantages; perhaps the most striking is that we still can, in our own lifetime, meet in person some of the very founders of our discipline. No living physicist has seen Newton; no chemist has heard Lavoisier. For us, it works. Today, Ladies and Gentlemen, we have the honor of introducing two of the undisputed pioneers of informatics.

Barbara Liskov

The first of our honorees today is Professor Barbara Liskov. To understand her contributions it is essential to realize the unfair competition in which the so-called Moore’s law pits computer software against computing hardware. To match the astounding progress of computing speed and memory over the past five decades, all that we have on the software side is our own intelligence which, it is safe to say, doesn’t double every eighteen months at constant price. The key to scaling up is abstraction; all advances in programming methodology have relied on new abstraction techniques. Perhaps the most significant is data abstraction, which enables us to organize complex systems on the basis of the types of objects they manipulate, defined in completely abstract terms. This is the notion of abstract data type, a staple component today of every software curriculum, including in the very first programming course here ETH. it was introduced barely thirty years ago in a seemingly modest article in SIGPLAN Notices — the kind of publication that hardly registers a ripple in science indexes — by Barbara Liskov and Stephen Zilles. Few papers have had a more profound impact on the theory and practice of software development than this contribution, “Programming with Abstract Data Types”.

The idea of abstract data types, or ADTs, is one of those Egg of Christopher Columbus moments; a seemingly simple intuition that changes the course of things. An ADT is a class of objects described in terms not of their internal properties, but of the operations applicable to them, and the abstract properties of these operations. Not by what they are, but by what they have. A rather capitalistic view of the world, but well suited to the description of complex systems where each part knows as little as possible about the others to protect itself about their future changes.

An abstraction such as ETH-Commencement could be described in a very concrete way: it happens in a certain place, consists of one event after another, gathers so many people. This is what we computer scientists call an implementation-oriented view, and relying on it means that we can’t change any detail without endangering the consistency of other processes, such as the daily planning of room allocation in the Main Building, which use it. In an ADT view, the abstraction “ETH Commencement” is characterized not by what it is but by what it has: a start, an end, an audience, and operations such as “Schedule the ETH Commencement”, “ Reschedule it”, “Start it”, “End it”. They provide to the rest of the world a clean, precisely specified interface which enables every ADT to use every other based on the minimum properties it requires, thus isolating them from irrelevant internal changes, and providing an irreplaceable weapon in the incessant task of software engineering: battling complexity.

Barbara Liskov didn’t stay with the theoretical concepts but implemented the ideas in the CLU language, one of the most influential of the set of programming languages that in the nineteen-seventies changed our perspective of how to develop good software.

She went on to seminal work on operating systems and distributed computing, introducing several widely applied concepts such as guardians, and always backing her theoretical innovations by building practical systems, from the CLU language and compiler to the Argus and Mercury distributed operating systems. Distributed systems, such as those which banks, airlines and other global enterprises run on multiple machines across multiple networks, raise particularly challenging issues. To quote from the introduction of her article on Argus:

A centralized system is either running or crashed, but a distributed system may be partly running and partly crashed. Distributed programs must cope with failures of the underlying hardware. Both the nodes and the network may fail. The goal of Argus is to provide mechanisms that make it easier for programmers to cope with these problems.

Barbara Liskov’s work introduced seminal concepts to deal with these extremely difficult problems.

Now Ford professor of engineering at MIT, she received not long ago the prestigious John von Neumann award of the IEEE; she has been one of the most influential people in software engineering. We are grateful for how Professor Barbara Liskov has helped shape the field are honored to have her at ETH today.

 Donald Knuth

In computer science and beyond, the name of Donald Knuth carries a unique aura. A professor at Stanford since 1968, now emeritus, he is the only person on record whose job title is the title of his own book: Professor of the Art of Computer Programming. This is for his eponymous multi-volume treatise, which established the discipline of algorithm analysis, and has had more effect than any other computer science publication. The Art of Computer Programming is a marvel of breadth, depth, completeness, mathematical rigor and clarity, not to forget humor. In that legendary book you will find exposed in detail the algorithms and data structures that lie at the basis of all software applications today. A Monte Carlo simulation, as a physicists may use, requires a number sequence that is both very long and very random-looking, even though the computer is a deterministic machine; if the simulation is any good, it almost certainly relies on the devious techniques which The Art of Computer Programming presents for making a perfectly deterministic sequence appear to have no order or other recognizable property. If you are running complex programs on your laptop, and they keep creating millions of software objects without clogging up gigabytes of memory, chances are the author of the garbage collector program is using techniques he learned from Knuth, with such delightful names as “the Buddy System”. If your search engine can at the blink of an eye find a needle of useful information in a haystack of tens of billions of Web pages, it’s most likely because they’ve been indexed using finely tuned data structures, such as hash tables, for which Knuth has been the reference for three decades through volume three, Searching and Sorting.

Knuth is famous for his precision and attention to detail, going so far as to offer a financial reward for every error found in his books, although one suspects this doesn’t cost him too much since people are so proud that instead of cashing the check they have it framed for display. The other immediately striking characteristic of Knuth is how profoundly he is driven by esthetics. This applies to performing arts, as anyone who was in the Fraumünster this morning and found out who the organist was can testify, but even more to his scientific work. The very title “the Art of computer programming” betrays this. Algorithms and data structures for Knuth are never dull codes for computers, but objects of intense esthetic pleasure and friendly discussion. This concern with beauty led to a major turn in his career, which delayed the continuation of the book series by many years but resulted in a development that has affected anyone who publishes scientific text. As he received the page proofs of the second edition of one of the volumes in the late seventies he was so repelled by its physical appearance, resulting from newly introduced computer typesetting technology, that he decided to build a revolutionary font design and text processing system, all by himself, from the ground up. This resulted in a number of publications such as a long and fascinating paper in the Bulletin of the American Mathematical Society entitled “The Letter S”, but even more importantly in widely successful and practical software programs which he wrote himself, TeX and Metafont, which have today become standards for scientific publishing. Here too he has shown the way in quality and rigor, being one of the very few people in the world who promise their software to be free of bugs, and backs that promise by giving a small financial reward for any counter-example.

His numerous other contributions are far too diverse to allow even a partial mention here; they have ranged across wide areas of computer science and mathematics.

To tell the truth, we are a little embarrassed that by bringing Professor Knuth here we are delaying by a bit more the long awaited release of volume 4. But we overcome this embarrassment in time to express our pride for having Donald Erwin Knuth at ETH for this anniversary celebration.

Watts Humphrey, 2007

At FOSE (see previous post [1]) we will honor the memory of Watts Humphrey, the pioneer of disciplined software engineering, who left us in October. A blog entry on my Communications of the ACM blog [2] briefly recalls some of Humphrey’s main contributions.

References

[1] The Future Of Software Engineering: previous entry of this blog.
[2] Watts Humphrey: In Honor of a Pioneer, in CACM blog.

In the next few days I will post a few comments about a topic of particular relevance to the future of our field: empirical software engineering. I am starting by reposting two entries originally posted in the CACM blog. Here is the first. Let me use this opportunity to mention the LASER summer school [1] on this very topic — it is still possible to register.

Empirical software engineering papers, at places like ICSE (the International Conference on Software Engineering), used to be terrible.

There were exceptions, of course, most famously papers by Basili, Zelkowitz, Rombach, Tichy, Berry, Humphrey, Gilb, Boehm, Lehmann, Belady and a few others, who kept hectoring the community about the need to base our opinions and practices on evidence rather than belief. But outside of these cases the typical ICSE empirical paper — I sat through a number of them — was depressing: we made these measurements in our company, found these results, just believe us. A question here in the back? Can you reproduce our results? Access our code? We’d love you to, but unfortunately we work for a company — the Call for Papers said industry contributions were welcome, didn’t it? — and we can’t give you the details. So sorry. But trust us, we checked our results.

Actually, there was another kind of empirical paper, which did not suffer from such secrecy: the university study. Hi, I am professor Bright, the well-known author of the Bright method of software development. Everyone knows it’s the best, but we wanted to assess it scientifically through a rigorous empirical study. I gave the same programming problem to two groups of third-year undergraduates; one group was told to use the Bright method, the other not. Guess what? The Bright group performed 67.94% better! I see the session chair wanting to move to the next speaker; see the details in the paper.

For years, this was most of what we had: unverifiable industry reports and unconvincing student experiments.

And suddenly the scene has changed. Empirical software engineering studies are in full bloom; the papers are flowing, and many are good!

What triggered this radical change is the availability of open-source repositories. Projects such as Linux, Eclipse, Apache, EiffelStudio and many others have records going back 10, 15, sometimes 20 years. These records contain the true history of the project: commits (into the configuration management system), bug reports, bug fixes, test runs and their results, developers involved, and many more elements of project data. All of a sudden empirical research has what any empirical science needs: a large corpus of objects to analyze.

Open-source projects have given the decisive jolt, but now we can rely on industrial data as well: Microsoft and other companies have started making their own records selectively available to researchers. In the work of authors such as Zeller from Sarrebruck, Gall from Uni. Zurich or Nagappan from Microsoft, systematic statistical techniques yield answers, sometimes surprising, to questions on which we could only speculate. Do novices or experts cause more bugs? Does test coverage correlate with software quality, and if so, positively or negatively? Little by little, we are learning about the true properties of software products and processes, based not on fantasies but on quantitative analysis of meaningful samples.

The trend is unmistakable, and irreversible.

Not all is right yet; in the second installment of this post I will describe some of what still needs to be improved for empirical software engineering to achieve full scientific rigor.

Reference

[1] LASER summer school 2010, at http://se.ethz.ch/laser.

I am blogging live from the “Cloud Futures” conference organized by Microsoft in Redmond [1]. We had two excellent keynotes today, by Ed Lazowska [1] and David Patterson.

Lazowska emphasized the emergence of a new kind of science — eScience — based on analysis of enormous amounts of data. His key point was that this approach is a radical departure from “computational science” as we know it, based mostly on large simulations. With the eScience paradigm, the challenge is to handle the zillions of bytes of data that are available, often through continuous streams, in such fields as astronomy, oceanography or biology. It is unthinkable in his view to process such data through super-computing architectures specific to an institution; the Cloud is the only solution. One of the reasons (developed more explicitly in Patterson’s talk) is that cloud computing supports scaling down as well as scaling up. If your site experiences sudden bursts of popularity — say you get slashdotted — followed by downturns, you just cannot size the hardware right.

Lazowska also noted that it is impossible to convince your average  university president that Cloud is the way to go, as he will get his advice from the science-by-simulation  types. I don’t know who the president is at U. of Washington, but I wonder if the comment would apply to Stanford?

The overall argument for cloud computing is compelling. Of course the history of IT is a succession of swings of the pendulum between centralization and delocalization: mainframes, minis, PCs, client-server, “thin clients”, “The Network Is The Computer” (Sun’s slogan in the late eighties), smart clients, Web services and so on. But this latest swing seems destined to define much of the direction of computing for a while.

Interestingly, no speaker so far has addressed issues of how to program reliably for the cloud, even though cloud computing seems only to add orders of magnitude to the classical opportunities for messing up. Eiffel and contracts have a major role to play here.

More generally the opportunity to improve quality should not be lost. There is a widespread feeling (I don’t know of any systematic studies) that a non-negligible share of results generated by computational science are just bogus, the product of old Fortran programs built by generations of graduate students with little understanding of software principles. At the very least, moving to cloud computing should encourage the use of 21-th century tools, languages and methods. Availability on the cloud should also enhance a critical property of good scientific research: reproducibility.

Software engineering is remarkably absent from the list of scientific application areas that speaker after speaker listed for cloud computing. Maybe software engineering researchers are timid, and do not think of themselves as deserving large computing resources; consider, however, all the potential applications, for example in program verification and empirical software engineering. The cloud is a big part of our own research in verification; in particular the automated testing paradigm pioneered by AutoTest [3] fits ideally with the cloud and we are actively working in this direction.

Lazowska mentioned that development environments are the ultimate application of cloud computing. Martin Nordio at ETH has developed, with the help of Le Minh Duc, a Master’s student at Hanoi University of Technology, a cloud-based version of EiffelStudio: CloudStudio, which I will present in my talk at the conference tomorrow. I’ll write more about it in later posts; just one note for the moment: no one should ever be forced again to update or commit.

References

[1] Program of the Cloud Futures conference.

[2] Keynote by Ed Lazowska. You can see his slides here.

[3] Bertrand Meyer, Arno Fiva, Ilinca Ciupa, Andreas Leitner, Yi Wei, Emmanuel Stapf: Programs That Test Themselves. IEEE Computer, vol. 42, no. 9, pages 46-55, September 2009; online version here.

The next SEAFOOD (Software Engineering Advances For Offshore and Outsourced Development) conference will take place in Saint Petersburg, Russia, on 17 and 18 June 2010. The conference co-chairs are Andrey Terekhov from Saint Petersburg State University and Lanit-Tercom, and Martin Nordio from ETH are conference co-chairs. Mathai Joseph from Tata Consulting Services and I will be co-chairing the PC. The Call for Papers will be issued soon; information about this year’s conference at seafood.ethz.ch.