Bertrand Meyer's technology+ blog
Software engineering, programming methodology, languages, verification, general technology, publication culture, and more
The next event at the LASER center in Villebrumier (Toulouse area, Southwest France) is FISEE, Frontiers in Software Engineering Education, see the web site. This small-scale workshop, 11 to 13 November is devoted to what Software Engineering needs, what should be changed, and how new and traditional institutions can adapt to the fast pace of … Read more
Once you have learned the benefits of formally expressing requirements, you keep noticing potential ambiguities and other deficiencies [1] in everyday language. Most such cases are only worth a passing smile, but here’s one that perhaps can serve to illustrate a point with business analysts in your next requirements engineering workshop or with students in your … Read more
The DEVOPS 2019 workshop (6-8 May 2019) follows a first 2018 workshop whose proceedings [1] have just been published in the special LASER-Villebrumier subseries of Springer Lecture notes in Computer Science. It is devoted to software engineering aspects of continuous development and new paradigms of software production and deployment, including but not limited to DevOps. … Read more
There is a fateful ritual to keynote invitations. The first message reads (I am paraphrasing): “Respected peerless luminary of this millennium and the next, Will your excellency ever forgive me for the audacity of asking if you would deign to leave for a short interlude the blessed abodes that habitually beget your immortal insights, and … Read more
Imagine having had coffee, over the years, with each of Euclid, Galileo, Descartes, Marie Curie, Newton, Einstein, Lise Leitner, Planck and de Broglie. For a computer scientist, if we set aside the founding generation (the Turings and von Neumanns), the equivalent is possible. I have had the privilege of meeting and in some cases closely … Read more
We “core” computer scientists and software engineers always whine that our research themes forever prevent us, to the delight of our physicist colleagues but unjustly, from reaching the gold standard of academic recognition: publishing in Nature. I think I have broken this barrier now by disproving the old, dusty laws of physics! Brace yourself for … Read more
… at my would-be coauthors, would someone please tell them, and every non-native-English-speaker-but-aspiring-English-author, to read this? Please, please, please, please, please. In English the verb “allow” cannot take an infinitive as a complement. Ever. You may not write “my method allows to improve productivity” (even if it’s true, which it probably isn’t, but never mind). … Read more
(Reproduced from my CACM blog.) One of the small pleasures of life is to win a technical argument with a graduate student. You feel good, as well you should. It is only human to be want to be right. Besides, if you ended up being wrong all or most of the time, you should start … Read more
One of the most significant recent developments in software engineering is the concept of Devops*. Dismissing the idea as “just the latest buzzword” would be wrong. It may be a buzzword but it reflects a fundamental change in the way we structure system development; with web applications in particular the traditional distinctions between steps of … Read more
Many programs take “execution arguments” which the program users provide at the start of execution. In EiffelStudio you can enter them under Execution -> Execution parameters. The program can access them through the Kernel Library class ARGUMENTS. Typically, the root class of the system inherits from ARGUMENTS and its creation procedure will include something like … Read more