Bertrand Meyer's technology+ blog
Software engineering, programming methodology, languages, verification, general technology, publication culture, and more
Bertrand Meyer: Making Sense of Agile Methods, in IEEE Software, vol. 35, no. 2, March 2018, pages 91-94. IEEE article page here (may require membership or purchase). Draft available here. An assessment of agile methods, based on my book Agile! The Good, the Hype and the Ugly. It discusses, beyond the hype, the benefits and … Read more
Every couple of weeks or so, I receive a message such as the one below; whenever I give a talk on any computer science topic anywhere in the world, strangers come to me to express similar sentiments. While I enjoy compliments as much as anyone else, I am not the right recipient for such comments. … Read more
Interview (in Russian) of Nadia Polikarpova (who proved the correctness of the EiffelBase 2 library in her PhD at ETH and is now an assistant professor at UCSD) on the site of her original university, ITMO. She explains the US tenure-track system to Europeans — good luck! She also says that programming language people are … Read more
(Adapted from a two-part article on the Communications of the ACM blog.) 1 The rise of empirical software engineering One of the success stories of software engineering research in recent decades has been the rise of empirical studies. Visionaries such as Vic Basili, Marvin Zelkowitz and Walter Tichy advocated empirical techniques early [1, 2, 3]; … Read more
We “core” computer scientists and software engineers always whine that our research themes forever prevent us, to the delight of our physicist colleagues but unjustly, from reaching the gold standard of academic recognition: publishing in Nature. I think I have broken this barrier now by disproving the old, dusty laws of physics! Brace yourself for … Read more
(Reposted from the CACM blog [*].) Software engineering was never a popular subject. It started out as “programming methodology”, evoking the image of bearded middle-aged men telling you with a Dutch, Swiss-German or Oxford accent to repent and mend your ways. Consumed (to paraphrase Mark Twain) by the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, might actually … Read more
The full lineup of speakers at the 2018 LASER summer school on Software for Blockchains, Bitcoin and Distributed Trust is now ready, with the announcement of a new speaker, Primavera De Filippi from CNRS and Harvard on social and legal aspects. The other speakers are Christian Cachin (IBM), Maurice Herlihy (Brown), Christoph Jentzsch (slock.it), me, … Read more
One of the most significant recent developments in software engineering is the concept of Devops*. Dismissing the idea as “just the latest buzzword” would be wrong. It may be a buzzword but it reflects a fundamental change in the way we structure system development; with web applications in particular the traditional distinctions between steps of … Read more
Many programs take “execution arguments” which the program users provide at the start of execution. In EiffelStudio you can enter them under Execution -> Execution parameters. The program can access them through the Kernel Library class ARGUMENTS. Typically, the root class of the system inherits from ARGUMENTS and its creation procedure will include something like … Read more
Just about a year ago I posted this announcement about my just released Agile course: In spite of all the interest in both agile methods and MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) there are few courses on agile methods; I know only of some specialized MOOCs focused on a particular language or method. I produced for … Read more