Publication announcement
New paper: making sense of agile methods
Bertrand Meyer: Making Sense of Agile Methods, in IEEE Software, vol. 35, no. 2, March 2018, pages 91-94. IEEE article page here (may require membership or purchase). Draft available here. An assessment of agile methods, based on my book Agile! The Good, the Hype and the Ugly. It discusses, beyond the hype, the benefits and … Read more
Design by Contract: ACM Webinar this Thursday
A third ACM webinar this year (after two on agile methods): I will be providing a general introduction to Design by Contract. The date is this coming Thursday, September 17, and the time is noon New York (18 Paris/Zurich, 17 London, 9 Los Angeles, see here for hours elsewhere). Please tune in! The event is … Read more
New paper: Theory of Programs
Programming, wrote Dijkstra many years ago, is a branch of applied mathematics. That is only half of the picture: the other half is engineering, and this dual nature of programming is part of its attraction. Descriptions of the mathematical side are generally, in my view, too complicated. This article [1] presents a mathematical theory of … Read more
Understanding and assessing Agile: free ACM webinar next Wednesday
ACM is offering this coming Wednesday a one-hour webinar entitled Agile Methods: The Good, the Hype and the Ugly. It will air on February 18 at 1 PM New York time (10 AM West Coast, 18 London, 19 Paris, see here for more cities). The event is free and the registration link is here. The … Read more
Awareness and merge conflicts in distributed development (new paper)
How can we make sure that people are aware of each other’s changes to a shared software base? Iin particular, can we avoid the dreaded case of a merge conflict: you and I are working on the same piece of code, but we find out too late, and we have to undergo the painful process of reconciling our conflicting changes.
Framing the frame problem (new paper)
Among the open problems of verification, particularly the verification of object-oriented programs, one of the most vexing is framing: how to specify and verify what programs element do not change. Continuing previous work, this article presents a “double frame inference” method, automatic on both sides the specification and verification sides. There is no need to … Read more
Detecting deadlock automatically? (New paper)
To verify sequential programs, we have to prove that they do the right thing, but also that they do it within our lifetime — that they terminate. The termination problem is considerably harder with concurrent programs, since they add a new form of non-termination: deadlock. A set of concurrent processes or threads will deadlock if … Read more
Analysis of agile methods: book signing in Paris this Friday at 5 PM
The Paris computer science bookstore Le Monde en Tique is organizing, this coming Friday, Oct. 3, starting at 5 PM, a signing session for my book Agile! The Good, the Hype and the Ugly [1]. About the book (for readers new to this site): it provides a cold-blooded analysis of agile methods and examines their … Read more
Accurately Analyzing Agility
Book announcement: Agile! The Good, the Hype and the Ugly Bertrand Meyer Springer, 2014 (just appeared) Book page: here. Amazon page: here. Publisher’s page: here A few years ago I became fascinated with agile methods: with the unique insights they include; with the obvious exaggerations and plainly wrong advice they also promote; and perhaps most … Read more