Bringing C code to the modern world






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




LASER summer school: Software for the Cloud and Big Data






The 2013 LASER summer school, organized by our chair at ETH, will take place September 8-14, once more in the idyllic setting of the Hotel del Golfo in Procchio, on the island of Elba in Italy. This is already the 10th conference; the roster of speakers so far reads like a who’s who of software … Read more




Doing it right or doing it over?






(Adapted from an article in the Communications of the ACM blog.) I have become interested in agile methods because they are all the rage now in industry and, upon dispassionate examination, they appear to be a pretty amazing mix of good and bad ideas. I am finishing a book that tries to sort out the … Read more




ESEC/FSE 2013: 18-26 August, Saint Petersburg, Russia






The European Software Engineering Conference takes place every two years in connection with the ACM Foundations of Software Engineering symposium (which in even years is in the US). The next ESEC/FSE  will be held for the first time in Russia, where it will be the first major international software engineering conference ever. It comes at … Read more




Salad requirements, requirements salad






If definitions are so hard, are requirements then impossible? The trick is that we often do not need a dictionary-style definition of what things are; we only need to know what they have, in other words what are their properties and operations. This is the abstract data type approach, also known as object technology. But it is still hard to convince the stakeholders to explain what they mean.







Domain Theory: precedents






Both Gary Leavens and Jim Horning commented (partly here, partly on Facebook) about my Domain Theory article [1] to mention that Larch had mechanisms for domain modeling and specification reuse. As Horning writes: The Larch Shared Language was really all about creating reusable domain theories, including theorems about the domains.  See, for example [2] and … Read more




Domain Theory: the forgotten step in program verification






  Program verification is making considerable progress but is hampered by a lack of abstraction in specifications. A crucial step is, almost always, absent from the process; this omission is the principal obstacle to making verification a standard component of everyday software development. 1. Steps in software verification In the first few minutes of any … Read more




TOOLS 2012, “The Triumph of Objects”, Prague in May: Call for Workshops






The TOOLS federated conferences, held in Prague May 28 to June 1, will include five conferences (TOOLS EUROPE, ICMT, Software Composition, Tests And Proofs, Multicore Software Engineering) and a number of workshop. It is still possible to propose workshops; the instructions are given here.