Bertrand Meyer's technology+ blog
Software engineering, programming methodology, languages, verification, general technology, publication culture, and more
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
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
Preprint of new article: Victoria Kananchuk, Ilgiz Mustafin and Bertrand Meyer, Bugfix: a standard language, database schema and repository for research on bugs and automatic program repair, submitted for publication, February 2025. Available on arXiv here. Also available here. What this is in a nutshell (there is a longer abstract below): a proposal for, and … Read more
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
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
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
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
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