Bertrand Meyer's technology+ blog
Software engineering, programming methodology, languages, verification, general technology, publication culture, and more
Once again, and we are not learning! La Repubblica of last Thursday [1] and other Italian newspapers have reported on a “computer” error that temporarily brought thousands of accounts at the national postal service bank into the red. It is a software error, due to a misplacement of the decimal points in some transactions. As usual … Read more
The next SEAFOOD (Software Engineering Advances For Offshore and Outsourced Development) conference will take place in Saint Petersburg, Russia, on 17 and 18 June 2010. The conference co-chairs are Andrey Terekhov from Saint Petersburg State University and Lanit-Tercom, and Martin Nordio from ETH are conference co-chairs. Mathai Joseph from Tata Consulting Services and I will … Read more
Airplanes today are incomparably safer than 20, 30, 50 years ago: 0.05 deaths per billion kilometers. That’s not by accident. Rather, it’s by accidents. What has turned air travel from a game of chance into one of the safest modes of traveling is the relentless study of crashes and other mishaps. In the US the … Read more
Many blogs including this one rely on the WordPress software. In previous states of the present page you may have noticed a small WordPress bug, which I find interesting. “Tags” are a nifty WordPress feature. When you post a message, you can specify one or more informative “tags”. The tags of all messages appear in the right sidebar, … Read more
Last year I published in IEEE Computer a short paper entitled “Seven Principles of Software Testing” [1]. Although technical, it was an opinion piece and the points were provocative enough to cause a reader, Gerald Everett, to express strong disagreement. Robert Glass, editor of the “Point/Counterpoint” rubric of the sister publication, IEEE Software, invited both … Read more
My textbook Touch of Class: An Introduction to Programming Well Using Objects and Contracts [1] is now available from Springer Verlag [2]. I have been told of many bookstores in Europe that have it by now; for example Amazon Germany [3] offers immediate delivery. Amazon US still lists the book as not yet published [4], but … Read more
Once in a while one hits a tool that is just right. An example worth publicizing is the EasyChair system for conference management [1], which — after a first experience as reviewer — I have selected whenever I was in a position to make the choice for a new conference in recent years. At first … Read more
“For someone in search of a software development method, the problem is not to find answers; it’s to find out how good the proposed answers are. We have lots of methods — every year brings its new harvest — but the poor practitioner is left wondering why last year’s recipe is not good enough after … Read more
A spectre is haunting programming — the spectre of null-pointer dereferencing. All the programming languages of old Europe and the New World have entered into a holy alliance to make everyone’s programs brittle: Java, C, Pascal, C++, C# and yes, until recently, Eiffel. The culprit is the use of references to denote objects used in calls: … Read more