New preprint: Seamless and Traceable Requirements






Maria Naumcheva, Sophie Ebersold, Jean-Michel Bruel and Bertrand Meyer, UOOR: Seamless and Traceable Requirements, submitted for publication, February 2025, preprint available on arXiv. This article grew out of Maria Naumcheva’s PhD thesis defended on December 18 at the University of Toulouse (I will write separately about the thesis as a whole). It is part of … Read more




New preprint: Loop unrolling — formal definition and application to testing






Li Huang, Bertrand Meyer and Reto Weber, New preprint: Loop unrolling:  formal definition and application to testing, February 2025, submitted to publication. Available here on arXiv and also here. Abstract Testing coverage criteria usually make a gross simplification: they assume that loops will have their bodies executed 0 or 1 time. How much (specificall,y how … Read more




New paper: seeding contradiction






Just published: Li Huang, Bertrand Meyer and Manuel Oriol, Seeding Contradiction: a fast method for generating full-coverage test suites, in Springer Nature Computer Science, vol. 6, no. 4, 2025. The text is available here on the publisher’s site. Also available is a preprint version. This just published SNCS article and revised and extended from a … Read more




New preprint: Programming Really Is Simple Mathematics






Bertrand Meyer and Reto Weber: Meaning as Programs — Programming Really Is Simple Mathematics, February 2025 preprint available here and also on arXiv. Theories of programming can be quite complicated; the presentation here is a return to essentials, defining programming and associated concepts (programming languages, programming methodology) entirely from elementary set-theoretical concepts. Unlike much of … Read more




New preprint: Software engineering as a domain to formalize






Bertrand Meyer, Software engineering as a domain to formalize, available here. This article is meant as a blog but was written as a standard text and I haven’t had the time to HTML-ize yet. So I am just providing an abstract below, and linking to the PDF which gives the details. The purpose is simple: … Read more




Freely accessible books






Recently I prepared some of my books for free access on the Web (after gaining agreement from the publishers). Here are the corresponding links. They actually point to pages that present the respective books and have further links to the actual PDF versions. Although the texts are essentially those of the books as published, I … Read more




The French School of Programming






July 14 (still here for 15 minutes) is not a bad opportunity to announced the publication of a new book: The French School of Programming. The book is a collection of chapters, thirteen of them, by rock stars of programming and software engineering research (plus me), preceded by a Foreword by Jim Woodcock and a … Read more




New article: scenarios versus OO requirements






Maria Naumcheva, Sophie Ebersold, Alexandr Naumchev, Jean-Michel Bruel, Florian Galinier and Bertrand Meyer: Object-Oriented Requirements: a Unified Framework for Specifications, Scenarios and Tests, in JOT (Journal of Object Technology), vol. 22, no. 1, pages 1:1-19, 2023. Available here with link to PDF  (the journal is open-access). From the abstract: A paradox of requirements specifications as … Read more




Statement Considered Harmful






I harbor no illusion about the effectiveness of airing this particular pet peeve; complaining about it has about the same chance of success as protesting against split infinitives or music in restaurants. Still, it is worth mentioning that the widespread use of the word “statement” to denote a programming language element, such as an assignment, that … Read more




“Object Success” now available






A full, free online version of Object Success (1995)   I am continuing the process of releasing some of my earlier books. Already available: Introduction to the Theory of Programming Languages (see here) and Object-Oriented Software Construction, 2nd edition (see here). The latest addition is Object Success, a book that introduced object technology to managers … Read more