Software engineering

The Professor Smith syndrome: Part 1 – a quiz

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[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

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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

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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

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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