New preprint: Lessons from Formally Deployed Software Systems






Li Huang, Sophie Ebersold, Alexander Kogtenkov, Bertrand Meyer and Yinling Liu, Lessons from Formally Verified Deployed Software Systems, submitted for publication (since March 2023), preprint available here for the full version (with detailed review of all 32 projects) and here for a shorter one (with same core content but only 11 detailed reviews, the others … 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




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




The legacy of Barry Boehm






August of last year brought the sad news of Barry Boehm’s passing away on August 20. If software engineering deserves at all to be called engineering today, it is in no small part thanks to him. “Engineer” is what Boehm was, even though his doctorate and other degrees were all in mathematics. He looked the … Read more




PhD and postdoc positions in verification in Switzerland






The Chair of Software Engineering, my group at the Schaffhausen Institute of Technology in Switzerland (SIT), has open positions for both PhD students and postdocs. We are looking for candidates with a passion for reliable software and a mix of theoretical knowledge and practical experience in software engineering. Candidates should have degrees in computer science … 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




Gail Murphy to speak at Devops 19






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




Towards empirical answers to important software engineering questions






(Adapted from a two-part article on the Communications of the ACM blog.) 1 The rise of empirical software engineering One of the success stories of software engineering research in recent decades has been the rise of empirical studies. Visionaries such as Vic Basili, Marvin Zelkowitz and Walter Tichy advocated empirical techniques early [1, 2, 3]; … Read more