Software engineering

The Professor Smith syndrome: Part 1 – a quiz

by






[As a reminder, this blog is now on a regular schedule, appearing every Monday. Sometimes in mid-week there will be a lighter piece or, as here, a preparation for the following Monday’s entry.] Consider the following hypothetical report in experimental software engineering (see earlier posts: [1], [2]): Professor Smith has developed a new programming technique, … Read more




In praise of Knuth and Liskov

by






Youth has its advantages; perhaps the most striking is that we can, in our own lifetime, meet in person some of the very founders of our discipline. No living physicist has seen Newton; no chemist has heard Lavoisier. For us, it works. Today, Ladies and Gentlemen, we have the honor of introducing two of the undisputed pioneers of informatics.







Publish no loop without its invariant

by






There may be no more blatant example of the disconnect between the software engineering community and the practice of programming than the lack of widespread recognition for the fundamental role of loop invariants.







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

by






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

by






  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