Software process
The rise of empirical software engineering (I): the good news
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
Another DOSE of distributed software development
The software world is not flat; it is multipolar. Gone are the days of one-site, one-team developments. The increasingly dominant model today is a distributed team; the place where the job gets done is the place where the appropriate people reside, even if it means that different parts of the job get done in different … Read more
The other impediment to software engineering research
In the decades since structured programming, many of the advances in software engineering have come out of non-university sources, mostly of four kinds: Start-up technology companies (who played a large role, for example, in the development of object technology). Industrial research labs, starting with Xerox PARC and Bell Labs. Independent (non-university-based) author-consultants. Independent programmer-innovators, who start open-source communities … Read more
Verification As a Matter Of Course
At the ACM Symposium on Applied Computing (SAC) in Sierre last week, I gave a talk entitled “How you will be programming in 10 years”, describing a number of efforts by various people, with a special emphasis on our work at both ETH and Eiffel Software, which I think point to the future of software … Read more
Dwelling on the point
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
Specifying user interfaces
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