Bertrand Meyer's technology+ blog
Software engineering, programming methodology, languages, verification, general technology, publication culture, and more
The project consists of building a significant software system collaboratively, using techniques of distributed software development. Each university contributes a number of “teams”, typically of two or three students each; then “groups”, each made up of three teams from different universities, produce a version of the project.
(Please note the general disclaimer [1].) How Misclassification Impacts Bug Prediction [2], an article to be presented on Thursday at ICSE, is the archetype of today’s successful empirical software engineering research, deriving significant results from the mining of publicly available software project repositories — in this case Tomcat5 and three others from Apache, as well … Read more
To inaugurate the “Reading Notes” series [1] I will take articles from the forthcoming International Conference on Software Engineering. Since I am not going to ICSE this year I am instead spending a little time browsing through the papers, obligingly available on the conference site. I’ll try whenever possible to describe a paper before … Read more
I should occasionally present examples of the strange reasons people sometimes invoke for not using Eiffel. In an earlier article [1] I gave the basic idea common to all these reasons, but there are many variants, in the general style “I am responsible for IT policy and purchases for IBM, the US Department of … Read more
(Revised from an article originally published in the CACM blog. Part 2 of a two-part article.) Part 1 of this article (to be found here, please read it first) made fun of authors who claim that software engineering is a total failure — and, like everyone else, benefit from powerful software at every step … Read more
Software verification is progressing slowly but surely. Much of that progress is incremental: making the fundamental results applicable to real programs as they are built every day by programmers working in standard circumstances. A key condition is to minimize the amount of annotations that they have to provide. The article mentioned in my previous post, … Read more
The following presentations from our ETH group in the ICSE week (International Conference on Software Engineering, San Francisco) address important issues of software specification and verification, describing new techniques that we have recently developed as part of our work building EVE, the Eiffel Verification Environment. One is at ICSE proper and the other at … Read more
On April 11 I gave the “Ershov lecture” in Novosibirsk. I talked about concurrency; a video recording is available here. The lecture is given annually in memory of Andrey P. Ershov, one of the founding fathers of Russian computer science and originator of many important concepts such as partial evaluation. According to Wikipedia, Knuth … Read more
The C2Eif translator developed by Marco Trudel takes C code and translates it into Eiffel; it produces not just a literal translation but a re-engineering version exhibiting object-oriented properties. Trudel defended his PhD thesis last Friday at ETH (the examiners were Hausi Muller from Victoria University, Manuel Oriol from ABB, Richard Paige from the University … Read more