How good are strong specifications? (New paper, ICSE 2013)






  A core aspect of our verification work is the use of “strong” contracts, which express sophisticated specification properties without requiring a separate specification language: even for advanced properties, there is no need for a separate specification language, with special notations such as those of first-order logic; instead, one can continue to rely, in the … Read more




New LASER proceedings






Springer has just published in the tutorial sub-series of Lecture Notes in Computer Science a new proceedings volume for the LASER summer school [1]. The five chapters are notes from the 2008, 2009 and 2010 schools (a previous volume [2] covered earlier schools). The themes range over search-based software engineering (Mark Harman and colleagues), replication … Read more




TOOLS 2012, “The Triumph of Objects”, Prague in May: Call for Workshops






The TOOLS federated conferences, held in Prague May 28 to June 1, will include five conferences (TOOLS EUROPE, ICMT, Software Composition, Tests And Proofs, Multicore Software Engineering) and a number of workshop. It is still possible to propose workshops; the instructions are given here.







Assessing concurrency models






In a recent experiment with students we wanted to know how the SCOOP concurrency model compares to Java Threads in terms of ease of learning, program readability and correctness. Our group, however, is heavily involved with SCOOP. How did we address the risk of bias, and other parts of the “Professor Smith Syndrome”? What are our results, and can you believe them?







The rise of empirical software engineering (II): what we are still missing






p>  (This article was initially published in the CACM blog.) The previous post under  the heading of empirical software engineering hailed the remarkable recent progress of this field, made possible in particular by the availability of large-scale open-source repositories and by the opening up of some commercial code bases. Has the empirical side of software … Read more




The rise of empirical software engineering (I): the good news






  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 … Read more