Education
Getting a program right, in nine episodes
About this article: it originated as a series of posts on the Communications of the ACM blog. I normally repost such articles here. (Even though copy-paste is usually not good, there are three reasons for this duplication: the readership seems to be largely disjoint; I can use better formatting, since their blog software is more … Read more
Talk on requirements at UC Santa Barbara tomorrow
I am giving a “distinguished lecture” at the University of California, Santa Barbara, January 10 (Friday, tomorrow) at 14. The title is A Comprehensive Approach to Requirements Engineering. The abstract and rest of the information are here. I will spend the last few minutes of the talk discussing other current developments (verification, concurrency).
Defining and classifying requirements (new publication)
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
What happened to the kilogram? Schaffhausen, 16 December
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
June LASER school, Elba, on Devops, Microservices…
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
Those were the days
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
Publications on CS/SE/informatics education
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
A theorem of software engineering
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
Software Engineering Education: FISEE coming up
Over the past few days I have come across several people who told me they want to attend the Frontiers In Software Engineering Education (FISEE) workshop in Villebrumier, 11-13 November, but have not registered yet. If that’s your case please register right now because: The number of spots is limited (it’s a residential event, everyone … Read more