Bertrand Meyer's technology+ blog
Software engineering, programming methodology, languages, verification, general technology, publication culture, and more
Often, “we do this and then we do that” is just a lazy way of stating “to do that, we must have achieved this.” The second form is more general than the first, since there may be many things you can “do” to achieve a certain condition. The extra generality is welcome for software requirements, … Read more
I am happy to announce the publication of the Handbook of Requirements and Business Analysis (Springer, 2022). It is the result of many years of thinking about requirements and how to do them right, taking advantage of modern principles of software engineering. While programming, languages, design techniques, process models and other software engineering disciplines have … Read more
Short version: the full text of my Introduction to the Theory of Programming Languages book (second printing, 1991) is now available. This page has more details including the table of chapters, and a link to the PDF (3.3MB, 448 + xvi pages). The book is a survey of methods for language description, particularly semantics (operational, … Read more
I have released for general usage the chapter on axiomatic semantics of my book Introduction to the Theory of Programming Languages. It’s old but I think it is still a good introduction to the topic. It explains: The notion of theory (with a nice — I think — example borrowed from an article by Luca … Read more
My book Object-Oriented Software Construction, 2nd edition (see the Wikipedia page) has become hard to get. There are various copies floating around the Web but they often use bad typography (wrong colors) and are unauthorized. In response to numerous requests and in anticipation of the third edition I have been able to make it available … Read more
There is a new paper out, several years in the making: The Role of Formalism in System Requirements Jean-Michel Bruel, Sophie Ebersold, Florian Galinier, Manuel Mazzara, Alexander Naumchev, Bertrand Meyer Computing Surveys (ACM), vol. 54, no. 5, June 2021, pages 1-36 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3448975 Preprint available here. The authors are from the Schaffhausen Institute of Technology … Read more
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
The best way to make software requirements precise is to use one of the available “formal” approaches. Many have been proposed; I am not aware of a general survey published so far. Over the past two years, we have been working on a comprehensive survey of the use of formality in requirements, of which we … 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