Bertrand Meyer's technology+ blog

My colleagues and I have just finished recording our new MOOC (online course), an official ETH offering on the EdX platform. The preview is available [1] and the course will run starting in September.

As readers of this blog know, I  have enthusiastically, under the impulsion of Marco Piccioni at ETH, embraced MOOC technology to support and spread our courses. The particular target has been the introduction to programming that I have taught for over a decade at ETH based on the Touch of Class textbook [2]. In February this blog announced [3] the release of our first MOOC, embodying the essentials of our ETH course and making it available not only to ETH students but to the whole world. The course does not just include video lectures: it also supports active student participation through online exercises and programs that can be compiled and tested on the cloud, with no software installation. These advanced features result from our research on support for distributed software development (by Christian Estler and Martin Nordio, with Carlo Furia and others).

This first course was a skunkworks project, which we did entirely on our own without any endorsement from ETH or any of the main MOOC players. We and our students have very much benefited from the consequent flexibility, and the use of homegrown technology relying on the MOODLE framework. We will keep this course for our own students and for any outside participant who prefers a small-scale, “boutique” version. But the EdX brand and EdX’s marketing power will enable us to reach a much broader audience. We want to provide the best introductory computing course on the market and the world needs to know about it. In addition, the full support of media services at ETH  helped us reach a higher standard on the technical side. (For our first course, the home-brewed one, we did not have a studio, so that every time an ambulance drove by — our offices are close to the main Zurich hospital — we had to restart the current take.)

The course’s content is not exactly the same: we have broadened the scope from just programming to computing, although it retains a strong programming component. We introduced additional elements such as an interview with Professor Peter Widmayer of ETH on the basics of computer science theory. For both new material and the topics retained from the first version we have adapted to the accepted MOOC practice of short segments, although we did not always exactly meet the eight-minute upper limit that was suggested to us.

We hope that you, and many newcomers, will like the course and benefit from it.

References

[3] EdX course: Computing: Art, Magic, Science, preview available here.

[2] Bertrand Meyer: Touch of Class: Learning how to Program Well, with Objects and Contracts, Springer Verlag, revised printing, 2013, book page here.

[3] Learning to Program, Online: article from this blog, 3 February 2014, available here.

It is remarkable that almost half a century after Dijkstra’s goto article, and however copiously and reverently it may be cited, today’s programs (other than in Eiffel) are still an orgy of gotos. There are not called gotos, being described as constructs that break out of a loop or exit a routine in multiple places, but they are gotos all the same. Multiple routine exits are particularly bad since they are in effect interprocedural gotos.

Ian Joyner has just released a simple and cogent summary of why routines should always have one entry and one exit.

References

[1] Ian Joyner: Single-entry, single-exit (SESE) heuristic, available here.

  
Book announcement:

Agile! The Good, the Hype and the Ugly
Bertrand Meyer
Springer, 2014 (just appeared)
Book page: here.
Amazon page: here.
Publisher’s page: here

A few years ago I became fascinated with agile methods: with the unique insights they include; with the obvious exaggerations and plainly wrong advice they also promote; and perhaps most of all with the constant intermingling of these two extremes.

I decided to play the game seriously: I read a good part of the agile literature, including all the important books; I sang the song, became a proud certified Scrum Master; I applied many agile techniques in my own work.

The book mentioned above is the result of that study and experience. It is both a tutorial and a critique.

The tutorial component was, I felt, badly needed. Most of the agile presentations I have seen are partisan texts, exhorting you to genuflect and adopt some agile method as the secret to a better life. Such preaching has a role but professionals know there is no magic in software development.  Agile! describes the key agile ideas objectively, concretely, and as clearly as I could present them. It does not introduce them in a vacuum, like the many agile books that pretend software engineering did not exist before (except for a repulsive idea, the dreaded “waterfall”). Instead, it relates them to many other concepts and results of software engineering, to which they bring their own additions and improvements.

Unfortunately, not all the additions are improvements. Up to now, the field has largely been left (with the exception of Boehm’s and Turner’s 2005 “Guide for the Perplexed“) to propaganda pieces and adoring endorsements. I felt that software developers would benefit more from a reasoned critical analysis. All the more so that agile methods are a remarkable mix of the best and the worst; the book carefully weeds out — in the terminology of the title — the ugly from the hype and the truly good.

Software developers and managers need to know about the “ugly”: awful agile advice that is guaranteed to harm your project. The “hype” covers ideas that have been widely advertised as shining agile contributions but have little relevance to the core goals of software development. The reason it was so critical to identify agile ideas belonging to these two categories is that they detract from the “good”, some of it remarkably good. I would not have devoted a good part of the last five years to studying agile methods if I did not feel they included major contributions to software engineering. I also found that some of these contributions do not get, in the agile literature itself, the explanations and exposure they deserve; I made sure they got their due in the book. An example is the “closed-window rule”, a simple but truly brilliant idea, of immediate benefit to any project.

Software methodology is a difficult topic, on which we still have a lot to learn. I expect some healthy discussions, but I hope readers will appreciate the opportunity to discuss agile ideas in depth for the greater benefit of quality software development.

I also made a point of writing a book that (unlike my last two) is short: 190 pages, including preface, index and everything else.

The table of contents follows; more details and sample chapters can be found on the book page listed above.

Preface
1 OVERVIEW
     1.1 VALUES
     1.2 PRINCIPLES
          Organizational principles
          Technical principles
     1.3 ROLES
     1.4 PRACTICES
          Organizational practices
          Technical practices
     1.5 ARTIFACTS
          Virtual artifacts
          Material artifacts
     1.6 A FIRST ASSESSMENT
          Not new and not good
          New and not good
          Not new but good
          New and good!

2 DECONSTRUCTING AGILE TEXTS
     2.1 THE PLIGHT OF THE TRAVELING SEMINARIST
          Proof by anecdote
          When writing beats speaking
          Discovering the gems
          Agile texts: reader beware!
     2.2 THE TOP SEVEN RHETORICAL TRAPS
          Proof by anecdote
          Slander by association
          Intimidation
          Catastrophism
          All-or-nothing
          Cover-your-behind
          Unverifiable claims
          Postscript: you have been ill-served by the software industry!

&3 THE ENEMY: BIG UPFRONT ANYTHING
     3.1 PREDICTIVE IS NOT WATERFALL
     3.2 REQUIREMENTS ENGINEERING
          Requirements engineering techniques
          Agile criticism of upfront requirements
          The waste criticism
          The change criticism
          The domain and the machine
     3.3 ARCHITECTURE AND DESIGN
          Is design separate from implementation?
          Agile methods and design
     3.4 LIFECYCLE MODELS
     3.5 RATIONAL UNIFIED PROCESS
     3.6 MATURITY MODELS
          CMMI in plain English
          The Personal Software Process
          CMMI/PSP and agile methods
          An agile maturity scale

4 AGILE PRINCIPLES
     4.1 WHAT IS A PRINCIPLE?
     4.2 THE OFFICIAL PRINCIPLES
     4.3 A USABLE LIST
     4.4 ORGANIZATIONAL PRINCIPLES
          Put the customer at the center
          Let the team self-organize
          Maintain a sustainable pace
          Develop minimal software
          Accept change
     4.5 TECHNICAL PRINCIPLES
          Develop iteratively
          Treat tests as a key resource
          Do not start any new development until all tests pass
          Test first
          Express requirements through scenarios

5 AGILE ROLES
     5.1 MANAGER
     5.2 PRODUCT OWNER
     5.3 TEAM
          Self-organizing
          Cross-functional
     5.4 MEMBERS AND OBSERVERS
     5.5 CUSTOMER
     5.6 COACH, SCRUM MASTER
     5.7 SEPARATING ROLES

6 AGILE PRACTICES: MANAGERIAL
     6.1 SPRINT
          Sprint basics
          The closed-window rule
          Sprint: an assessment
     6.2 DAILY MEETING
     6.3 PLANNING GAME
     6.4 PLANNING POKER
     6.5 ONSITE CUSTOMER
     6.6 OPEN SPACE
     6.7 PROCESS MINIATURE
     6.8 ITERATION PLANNING
     6.9 REVIEW MEETING
     6.10 RETROSPECTIVE
     6.11 SCRUM OF SCRUMS
     6.12 COLLECTIVE CODE OWNERSHIP
          The code ownership debate
          Collective ownership and cross-functionality

7 AGILE PRACTICES: TECHNICAL
     7.1 DAILY BUILD AND CONTINUOUS INTEGRATION
     7.2 PAIR PROGRAMMING
          Pair programming concepts
          Pair programming versus mentoring
          Mob programming
          Pair programming: an assessment
     7.3 CODING STANDARDS
     7.4 REFACTORING
          The refactoring concept
          Benefits and limits of refactoring
          Incidental and essential changes
          Combining a priori and a posteriori approaches
     7.5 TEST-FIRST AND TEST-DRIVEN DEVELOPMENT
          The TDD method of software development
          An assessment of TFD and TDD

8 AGILE ARTIFACTS
     8.1 CODE
     8.2 TESTS
     8.3 USER STORIES
     8.4 STORY POINTS
     8.5 VELOCITY
     8.6 DEFINITION OF DONE
     8.7 WORKING SPACE
     8.8 PRODUCT BACKLOG, ITERATION BACKLOG
     8.9 STORY CARD, TASK CARD
     8.10 TASK AND STORY BOARDS
     8.11 BURNDOWN AND BURNUP CHARTS
     8.12 IMPEDIMENT
     8.13 WASTE, TECHNICAL DEBT, DEPENDENCY, DEPENDENCY CHARTS

9 AGILE METHODS
     9.1 METHODS AND METHODOLOGY
          Terminology
          The fox and the hedgehog
     9.2 LEAN SOFTWARE AND KANBAN
          Lean Software’s Big Idea
          Lean Software’s principles
          Lean Software: an assessment
          Kanban
     9.3 EXTREME PROGRAMMING
          XP’s Big Idea
          XP: the unadulterated source
          Key XP techniques
          Extreme Programming: an assessment
     9.4 SCRUM
          Scrum’s Big Idea
          Key Scrum practices
          Scrum: an assessment
     9.5 CRYSTAL
          Crystal’s Big Idea
          Crystal principles
          Crystal: an assessment

10 DEALING WITH AGILE TEAMS
     10.1 GRAVITY STILL HOLDS
     10.2 THE EITHER-WHAT-OR-WHEN FALLACY

11 THE UGLY, THE HYPE AND THE GOOD: AN ASSESSMENT OF THE AGILE APPROACH
     11.1 THE BAD AND THE UGLY
          Deprecation of upfront tasks
          User stories as a basis for requirements
          Feature-based development and ignorance of dependencies
          Rejection of dependency tracking tools
          Rejection of traditional manager tasks
          Rejection of upfront generalization
          Embedded customer
          Coach as a separate role
          Test-driven development
          Deprecation of documents
     11.2 THE HYPED
     11.3 THE GOOD
     11.4 THE BRILLIANT
Bibliography
Index

Opinions requested! See at end.

A void call, during the execution of an object-oriented program, is a call of the standard OO form

x·some_routine (…)                                                /CALL/

where x, a reference, happens to be void (null) instead of denoting, as expected, an object. The operation is not possible; it leads to an exception and, usually, a crash of the program. Void calls are also called “null pointer dereferencing”.

One of the major advances in Eiffel over the past years has been the introduction of attached types, entirely removing the risk of void calls. The language mechanisms, extending the type system, make void-call avoidance a static property, part of type checking: just as the compiler will prevent you from assigning a boolean value to an integer variable, so will it flag your program if it sees a risk of void call. Put the other way around, if your program passes compilation, you have the guarantee that its executions will never produce a void call. Attached types thus remove one of the major headaches of programming, what Tony Hoare [1] called his “one-billion-dollar mistake”:

I call it my billion-dollar mistake. It was the invention of the null reference in 1965. At that time, I was designing the first comprehensive type system for references in an object oriented language (ALGOL W) [2]. My goal was to ensure that all use of references should be absolutely safe, with checking performed automatically by the compiler. But I couldn’t resist the temptation to put in a null reference, simply because it was so easy to implement. This has led to innumerable errors, vulnerabilities, and system crashes, which have probably caused a billion dollars of pain and damage in the last forty year

Thanks to attached types, Eiffel programmers can sleep at night: their programs will not encounter void calls.

To benefit from this advance, you must declare variables accordingly, as either attached (never void after initialization) or detachable (possibly void). You must also write the program properly:

• If you declare x attached, you must ensure in the rest of the program that before its first use x will have been attached to an object, for example through a creation instruction create x.
• If you declare x detachable, you must make sure that any call of the above form /CALL/ happens in a context where x is guaranteed to be non-void; for example, you could protect it by a test if x /= Void then… or, better, an “object test”.

Code satisfying these properties is called void-safe.

Void safety is the way to go: who wants to worry about programs, even after they have been thoroughly tested and have seemingly worked for a while, crashing at unpredictable times? The absence of null-pointer-dereferencing can be a statically  enforced property, as the experience of Eiffel now demonstrates; and that what it should be. One day, children will think void-safely from the most tender age, and their great-grandparents will tell them, around the fireplace during long and scary winter nights, about the old days when not everyone was programming in Eiffel and even those who did were worried about the sudden null-pointer-derefencing syndrome. To get void safety through ordinary x: PERSON declarations, you had (children, hold your breath) to turn on a compiler option!

The transition to void safety was neither fast nor easy; in fact, it has taken almost ten years. Not everyone was convinced from the beginning, and we have had to improve and simplify the mechanism along the way to make void-safe programming practical. Compatibility has been a key issue throughout: older classes are generally not void-safe, but in a language that has been around for many years and has a large code base of operational software it is essential to ensure a smooth transition. Void safety has, from its introduction, been controlled by a compiler option:

• With the option off, old code will compile as it used to do, but you do not get any guarantee of void safety. At execution time, a void call can still cause your program to go berserk.
• With the option on, you get the guarantee: no void calls. To achieve this goal, you have to make sure the classes obey the void safety rules; if they do not, the compiler will reject them until you fix the problem.

In the effort to reconcile the compatibility imperative with the inexorable evolution to void safety, the key decisions have affected default values for compiler options and language conventions. Three separate decisions, in fact. Two of the defaults have already been switched; the question asked at the end of this article addresses the switching of the last remaining one.

The first default governed the void-safety compiler option. On its introduction, void-safety was off by default; the mechanism had to be turned on explicitly, part of the “experimental” option that most EiffelStudio releases offer for new, tentative mechanisms. That particular decision changed a year ago, with version 7.3 (May 2013): now void safety is the default. To include non-void-safe code you must mark  it explicitly.

The second default affects a language convention: the meaning of a standard declaration. A typical declaration, such as

x: PERSON                                                                                      /A/

says that at run time x denotes a reference which, if not void, will be attached to an object of type PERSON.  In pre-void-safety Eiffel, as in today’s other typed OO languages,  the reference could occasionally become void at run time; in other words, x was detachable. With the introduction of void safety, you could emphasize this property by specifying it explicitly:

x: detachable PERSON                                                             /B/

You could also specify that x would never be void by declaring it attached, asking the compiler to guarantee this property for you (through its application of the void-safety rules to all operations involving x). The explicit form in this case is

x: attached PERSON                                                               /C/

In practical programming, of course, you do not want to specify attached or detachable all the time: you want to use the simple form /A/ as often as possible. Originally, since we were starting from a non-void-safe language, compatibility required /A/ to mean /B/ by default. But it turns out that “attached” really is the dominant case: most references should remain attached at all times and Void values should be reserved for important but highly specialized cases such as terminating linked data structures. So the simple form should, in the final state of the language, mean /C/. That particular default was indeed switched early (version 7.0, November 2011) for people using the void-safety compiler option. As a result, the attached keyword is no longer necessary for declarations such as the above, although it remains available. Everything is attached by default; when you want a reference that could be void (and are prepared to bear the responsibility for convincing the compiler that it won’t when you actually use it in a call), you declare it as detachable; that keyword remains necessary.

There remains one last step in the march to all-aboard-for-void-safety: removing the “detachable by default” option, that is to say, the compiler option that will make /A/ mean /B/ (rather than /C/). It is only an option, and not the default; but still it remains available. Do we truly need it? The argument for removing it  is that it simplifies the specification (the fewer options the better) and encourages everyone, even more than before, to move to the new world. The argument against is to avoid disturbing existing projects, including their compiler control files (ECFs).

The question looms: when do we switch the defaults? Some of us think the time is now; specifically, the November release (14.11) [4].

Do you think the option should go? We would like your opinion. Please participate in the Eiffelroom poll [5].

References and note

[1] C.A.R. Hoare: Null References: The Billion Dollar Mistake , abstract of talk at QCon London, 9-12 March 2009, available here.

[2] (BM note) As a consolation, before Algol W, LISP already had NIL, which is the null pointer.

[3] Bertrand Meyer, Alexander Kogtenkov and Emmanuel Stapf: Avoid a Void: The Eradication of Null Dereferencing, in Reflections on the Work of C.A.R. Hoare, eds. C. B. Jones, A.W. Roscoe and K.R. Wood, Springer-Verlag, 2010, pages 189-211, available here.

[4] EiffelStudio version numbering changed in 2014: from a classic major_number.minor_number to a plain year.month, with two principal releases, 5 and 11 (May and November).

[5] Poll on switching the attachment defaults: at the bottom of the Eiffelroom page here (direct access here).

(Adapted from an article previously published on the CACM blog.)

Often, you will be told that programming languages do not matter much. What actually matters more is not clear; maybe tools, maybe methodology, maybe process. It is a pretty general rule that people arguing that language does not matter are defending bad languages.

Let us consider the Apple bug of a few weeks ago. Only a few weeks; the world has already moved to Heartbleed (to be discussed in a subsequent article), but that is not a reason to sweep away the memory of the Apple bug and the language design that it reflects.

In late February, users of  iPhones, iPads and iPods were enjoined to upgrade their devices immediately because  “an attacker with a privileged network position may capture or modify data in sessions protected by SSL/TLS.” The bug was traced [1] to code of the following form:

if (error_of_first_kind)
goto fail;
if (error_of_second_kind)
goto fail;
if (error_of_third_kind)
goto fail;
if (error_of_fourth_kind)
goto fail;
if (error_of_fifth_kind)
goto fail;
goto fail;
if (error_of_sixth_kind)
goto fail;
The_truly_important_code_handling_non_erroneous_case

In other words: just a duplicated line! (The extra line is highlighted above.) But the excess “goto” is beyond the scope of the preceding “if“, so it is executed unconditionally: all executions go directly to the “fail” label, so that The_truly_important_code_handling_non_erroneous_case never gets executed.

Critics have focused their ire on the  goto instruction, but it is of little relevance. What matters, language-wise, is the C/C++-Java-C# convention of delimiting the scope of conditional instructions, loops and other kinds of composite structures. Every component of such structures in these languages is syntactically a single instruction, so that:

• If you want the branch to consist of an atomic instruction, you write that instruction by itself, as in: if (c) a = b;
• If you want a sequence of instructions, you write it as a compound, enclosed by the ever so beautiful braces: if (c) {a = b; x = y;}

Although elegant in principle (after all, it comes from Algol), this convention is disastrous from a software engineering perspective because software engineering means understanding that programs change. One day, a branch of a conditional or loop has one atomic instruction; sometime later, a maintainer realizes that the corresponding case requires more sophisticated treatment, and adds an instruction, but fails to add the braces.

The proper language solution is to do away with the notion of compound instruction as a separate concept, but simply expect all branches of composite instructions to consist of a sequence, which could consist of several instructions, just one, or none at all. In Eiffel, you will write

if  c then
   x := y
end

or

 if  c then
   a := b
   x := y
else
   u := v
end

or

from i := 1 until c loop
   a := b
   i := i + 1
end

or

across my_list as l loop
   l.add (x)
end

and so on. This syntax also gets rid of all the noise that pollutes programs in languages retaining C’s nineteen-sixties conventions: parentheses around the conditions, semicolons for instructions on different lines; these small distractions accumulate into serious impediments to program readability.

With such a modern language design, the Apple bug could not have arisen. A duplicated line is either:

• A keyword such as end, immediately caught as a syntax error.
• An actual instruction such as an assignment, whose duplication causes either no effect or an effect limited to the particular case covered by the branch, rather than catastrophically disrupting all cases, as in the Apple bug.

Some people, however, find it hard to accept the obvious responsibility of language design. Take this comment derisively entitled  “the goto squirrel” by Dennis Hamilton in the ACM Risks forum [2]:

It is amazing to me that, once the specific defect is disclosed (and the diff of the actual change has also been published), the discussion has devolved into one of coding style and whose code is better.  I remember similar distractions around the Ariane 501 defect too, although in that case there was nothing wrong with the code—the error was that it was being run when it wasn’t needed and it was not simulation tested with new launch parameters under the mistaken assumption that if the code worked for Ariane 4, it should work for Ariane 5.

It is not about the code.  It is not about the code.  It is not about goto. It is not about coming up with ways to avoid introducing this particular defect by writing the code differently.

Such certainty! Repeating a wrong statement ( “it is not about the code“) does not make it  right. Of course “it” is about the code! If the code had been different the catastrophe would not have happened, so one needs some gall to state that the code is not the issue — and just as much gall, given that the catastrophe would also not have happened if the programming language had been different, to state that it is not about the programming language.

When Mr. Hamilton dismisses as “distractions” the explanations pointing to programming-related causes for the Ariane-5 disaster, I assume he has in mind the analysis which I published at the time with Jean-Marc Jézéquel [3], which explained in detail how the core issue was the absence of proper specifications (contracts). At that time too, we heard dismissive comments; according to one of the critics, the programming aspects did not count, since the whole thing was really a social problem: the French engineers in Toulouse did not communicate properly with their colleagues in England! What is great with such folk explanations is that they sound just right and please people because they reinforce existing stereotypes. They are by nature as impossible to refute as they are impossible to prove. And they avoid raising the important but disturbing questions: were the teams using the right programming language, the right specification method (contracts, as our article suggested), appropriate tools? In both the Ariane-5 and Apple cases, they were not.

If you want to be considered polite, you are not supposed to point out that the use of programming languages designed for the PDP-8 or some other long-gone machine is an invitation to disaster. The more terrible the programming language people use, and the more they know it is terrible (even if they will not admit it), the more scandalized they will be that you point out that it is, indeed, terrible. It is as if you had said something about their weight or the pimples on their cheeks. Such reactions do not make the comment less true. The expression of outrage is particularly inappropriate when technical choices are not just matters for technical argument, but have catastrophic consequences on society.

The usual excuse, in response to language criticisms, is that better tools, better quality control (the main recommendation of the Ariane-5 inquiry committee back in 1997), better methodology would also have avoided the problem. Indeed, a number of the other comments in the comp.risks discussion that includes Hamilton’s dismissal of code [2] point in this direction, noting for example that static analyzers could have detected code duplication and unreachable instructions. These observations are all true, but change nothing to the role of programming languages and coding issues.  One of the basic lessons from the study of software and other industrial disasters — see for example the work of Nancy Leveson — is that a disaster results from a combination of causes. This property is in fact easy to understand: a disaster coming from a single cause would most likely have been avoided. Consider the hypothetical example of a disastrous flaw in Amazon’s transaction processing. It seems from various sources that Amazon processes something like 300 transactions a second. Now let us assume three independent factors, each occurring with a probability of a thousandth (10^-3), which could contribute to a failure. Then:

• It is impossible that one of the factors could cause failure just by itself: that means it would make a transaction fail after around 3 seconds, and would be caught even in the most trivial unit testing. No one but the developer would ever know about it.
• If two of the factors together cause failure, they will occur every million transactions, meaning about once an hour. Any reasonable testing will discover the problem before a release is ever deployed.
• If all three factors are required, the probability is 10^-9, meaning that a failure will occur about once a year. Only in that case will a real problem exist: a flaw that goes undetected for a long time, during which everything seems normal, until disaster strikes.

These observations explain why post-mortem examinations of catastrophes always point to a seemingly impossible combination of unfortunate circumstances. The archduke went to Sarajevo and he insisted on seeing the wounded and someone forgot to tell the drivers about the prudent decision to bypass the announced itinerary and the convoy stalled  and the assassin saw it and he hit Franz-Ferdinand right in the neck and there was nationalistic resentment in various countries and the system of alliances required countries to declare war [4]. Same thing for industrial accidents. Same thing for the Apple bug: obviously, there were no good code reviews and no static analysis tools applied and no good management; and, obviously, a programming language that blows out innocent mistakes into disasters of planetary import.

So much for the accepted wisdom, heard again and again in software engineering circles, that code does not matter, syntax does not count, typos are caught right away, and that all we should care about is process or agility or requirements or some other high-sounding concern more respectable than programming. Code? Programming languages? Did we not take care of those years ago? “I remember similar distractions.”

There is a  positive conclusion to the “and” nature (in probabilistic terms, the multiplicative nature) of causes necessary to produce a catastrophe in practice: it suffices to get rid of one of the operands of the “and” to falsify its result, hence avoiding the catastrophe. When people tell you that code does not matter or that language does not matter, just understand the comment for what it really means, “I am ashamed of the programming language and techniques I use but do not want to admit it so I prefer to blame problems on the rest of the world“, and make the correct deduction: use a good programming language.

References

[1] Paul Duckline:  Anatomy of a “goto fail” – Apple’s SSL bug explained, plus an unofficial patch for OS X!, Naked Security blog (Sophos), 24 February 2014, available here.

[2] Dennis E. Hamilton: The Goto Squirrel, ACM Risks Forum, 28 February 2014, available here.

[3] Jean-Marc Jézéquel and Bertrand Meyer: Design by Contract: The Lessons of Ariane, in Computer (IEEE), vol. 30, no. 1, January 1997, pages 129-130, available online here and, with reader responses here.

[4] Assassination of Ferdinand of Autria: here.

For almost anyone programming in Eiffel, contracts are just a standard part of daily life; Patrice Chalin’s pioneering study of a few years ago [1] confirmed this impression. A larger empirical study is now available to understand how developers actually use contracts when available. The study, to published at FM 2014 [2] covers 21 programs, not just in Eiffel but also in JML and in Code Contracts for C#, totaling 830,000 lines of code, and following the program’s revision history for a grand total of 260 million lines of code over 7700 revisions. It analyzes in detail whether programmers use contracts, how they use them (in particular, which kinds, among preconditions, postconditions and invariants), how contracts evolve over time, and how inheritance interacts with contracts.

The paper is easy to read so I will refer you to it for the detailed conclusions, but one thing is clear: anyone who thinks contracts are for special development or special developers is completely off-track. In an environment supporting contracts, especially as a native part of the language, programmers understand their benefits and apply them as a matter of course.

References

[1] Patrice Chalin: Are practitioners writing contracts?, in Fault-Tolerant System, eds. Butler, Jones, Romanovsky, Troubitsyna, Springer LNCS, vol. 4157, pp. 100–113, 2006.

[2] H.-Christian Estler, Carlo A. Furia, Martin Nordio, Marco Piccioni and Bertrand Meyer: Contracts in Practice, to appear in proceedings of 19th International Symposium on Formal Methods (FM 2014), Singapore, May 2014, draft available here.

The SCOOP concurrency model has a clear division of objects into “regions”, improving the clarity and reliability of concurrent programs by establishing a close correspondence between the object structure and the process structure. Each region has an associated “processor”, which executes operations on the region’s objects. A literal application of this rule implies, however, a severe performance penalty. As part of the work for his PhD thesis (defended two weeks ago), Benjamin Morandi found out that a mechanism for specifying certain processors as “passive” yields a considerable performance improvement. The paper, to be published at COORDINATION, describes the technique and its applications.

Reference

Benjamin Morandi, Sebastian Nanz and Bertrand Meyer: Safe and Efficient Data Sharing for Message-Passing Concurrency, to appear in proceedings of COORDINATION 2014, 16th International Conference on Coordination Models and Languages, Berlin, 3-6 June 2014, draft available here.
.

2014 marks the 10-th anniversary (11th edition) of the LASER summer school. The school will be held September 7-14, 2014, and the detailed information is here.

LASER (the name means Laboratory for Applied Software Engineering Research) is dedicated to practical software engineering. The roster of speakers since we started is a who’s who of innovators in the field. Some of the flavor of the school can gathered from the three proceedings volumes published in Springer LNCS (more on the way) or simply by browsing the pages of the schools from previous years.

Usually we have a theme, but to mark this anniversary we decided to go for speakers first; we do have a title, “Leading-Edge Software Engineering”, but broad enough to encompass a wide variety of a broad range of topics presented by star speakers: Harald Gall, Daniel Jackson, Michael Jackson, Erik Meijer (appearing at LASER for the third time!), Gail Murphy and Moshe Vardi. With such a cast you can expect to learn something important regardless of your own primary specialty.

LASER is unique in its setting: a 5-star hotel in the island paradise of Elba, with outstanding food and countless opportunities for exploring the marvelous land, the beaches, the sea, the geology (since antiquity Elba has been famous for its stones and minerals) and the history, from the Romans to Napoleon, who in the 9 months of his reign changed the island forever. The school is serious stuff (8:30 to 13 and 17 to 20 every day), but with enough time to enjoy the surroundings.

Registration is open now.

As part of our “Concurrency Made Easy” ERC Advanced Investigator Grant project (2012-2017), we are offering PhD positions at the Chair of Software Engineering of ETH Zurich. The goal of the project is to build a sophisticated programming and verification architecture to make concurrent and distributed programming simple and reliable, based on the ideas of Eiffel and particularly the SCOOP concurrency model. Concurrency in its various forms (particularly multithreading) as well as distributed computing are required for most of today’s serious programs, but programming concurrent applications remains a challenge. The CME project is determined to break this complexity barrier.  Inevitably, achieving simplicity for users (in this case, application programmers) requires, under the hood, a sophisticated infrastructure, both conceptual (theoretical models) and practical (the implementation). We are building that infrastructure.

ETH offers an outstanding research and education environment and competitive salaries for “assistants” (PhD students), who are generally expected in addition to their research to participate in teaching, in particular introductory programming, and other activities of the Chair.  The candidates we seek have: a master’s degree in computer science or related field from a recognized institution (as required by ETH); a strong software engineering background, both practical and theoretical, and more generally a strong computer science and mathematical culture; a good knowledge of verification techniques (e.g. Hoare-style, model-checking, abstract interpretation); some background in concurrency or distribution; and a passion for high-quality software development. Prior publications, and experience with Eiffel, are pluses. In line with ETH policy, particular attention will be given to female candidates.

Before applying, you should become familiar with our work; see in particular the research pages at se.ethz.ch including the full description of the CME project at cme.ethz.ch.

Candidates should send (in PDF or text ) to se-open-positions@lists.inf.ethz.ch a CV and a short cover letter describing their view of the CME project and ideas about their possible contribution.

Recently I mentioned the first law of branching (see earlier article) to Walter Tichy, famed creator of RCS, the system that established modern configuration management. He replied with the following anecdote, which is worth reproducing in its entirety (in his own words):

I started work on RCS in 1980, because I needed an alternative for SCCS, for which the license cost would have been prohibitive. Also, I wanted to experiment with reverse deltas. With reverse deltas, checking out the latest version is fast, because it is stored intact. For older ones, RCS applied backward deltas. So the older revisions took longer to extract, but that was OK, because most accesses are to the newest revision anyway.

At first, I didn’t know how to handle branches in this scheme. Storing each branch tip in full seemed like a waste. So I simply left out the branches.

It didn’t take long an people were using RCS. Bill Joy, who was at Berkeley at the time and working on Berkeley Unix, got interested. He gave me several hints about unpleasant features of SCCS that I should correct. For instance, SCCS didn’t handle identification keywords properly under certain circumstances, the locking scheme was awkward, and the commands too. I figured out a way to solve these issue. Bill was actually my toughest critic! When I was done with all the modifications, Bill cam back and said that he was not going to use RCS unless I put in branches. So I figured out a way. In order to reconstruct a branch tip, you start with the latest version on the main trunk, apply backwards deltas up to the branch point, and then apply forward deltas out to the branch tip. I also implemented a numbering scheme for branches that is extensible.

When discussing the solution, Bill asked me whether this scheme meant that it would take longer to check in and out on branches. I had to admit that this was true. With the machines at that time (VAXen) efficiency was important. He thought about this for a moment and then said that that was actually great. It would discourage programmers from using branches! He felt they were a necessary evil.

I have mentioned this paper before but as a draft. It has now been accepted by ACM’s Computing Surveys and is scheduled to appear in September 2014; the current text, revised from the previous version, is available [1].

Here is the abstract:

Software verification has emerged as a key concern for ensuring the continued progress of information technology. Full verification generally requires, as a crucial step, equipping each loop with a “loop invariant”. Beyond their role in verification, loop invariants help program understanding by providing fundamental insights into the nature of algorithms. In practice, finding sound and useful invariants remains a challenge. Fortunately, many invariants seem intuitively to exhibit a common flavor. Understanding these fundamental invariant patterns could therefore provide help for understanding and verifying a large variety of programs.

We performed a systematic identification, validation, and classification of loop invariants over a range of fundamental algorithms from diverse areas of computer science. This article analyzes the patterns, as uncovered in this study,governing how invariants are derived from postconditions;it proposes a taxonomy of invariants according to these patterns, and presents its application to the algorithms reviewed. The discussion also shows the need for high-level specifications based on “domain theory”. It describes how the invariants and the corresponding algorithms have been mechanically verified using an automated program prover; the proof source files are available. The contributions also include suggestions for invariant inference and for model-based specification.

Reference

[1] Carlo Furia, Bertrand Meyer and Sergey Velder: Loop invariants: Analysis, Classification and Examples, in ACM Computing Surveys, to appear in September 2014, preliminary text available here.

This report continues the series of ICSE 2013 article previews (see the posts of these last few days, other than the DOSE announcement), but is different from its predecessors since it talks about a paper from our group at ETH, so you should not expect any dangerously delusional,  disingenuously dubious or downright deceptive declaration or display of dispassionate, disinterested, disengaged describer’s detachment.

The paper [1] (mentioned on this blog some time ago) is entitled How good are software specifications? and will be presented on Wednesday by Nadia Polikarpova. The basic result: stronger specifications, which capture a more complete part of program functionality, cause only a modest increase in specification effort, but the benefits are huge; in particular, automatic testing finds twice as many faults (“bugs” as recently reviewed papers call them).

Strong specifications are specifications that go beyond simple contracts. A straightforward example is a specification of a push operation for stacks; in EiffelBase, the basic Eiffel data structure library, the contract’s postcondition will read

item = x                                          /A/
count = old count + 1

where x is the element being pushed, item the top of the stack and count the number of elements. It is of course sound, since it states that the element just pushed is now the new top of the stack, and that there is one more element; but it is also  incomplete since it says nothing about the other elements remaining as they were; an implementation could satisfy the contract and mess up with these elements. Using “complete” or “strong” preconditions, we associate with the underlying domain a theory [2], or “model”, represented by a specification-only feature in the class, model, denoting a sequence of elements; then it suffices (with the convention that the top is the first element of the model sequence, and that “+” denotes concatenation of sequences) to use the postcondition

model = <x> + old model         /B/

which says all there is to say and implies the original postconditions /A/.

Clearly, the strong contracts, in the  /B/ style, are more expressive [3, 4], but they also require more specification effort. Are they worth the trouble?

The paper explores this question empirically, and the answer, at least according to the criteria used in the study, is yes.  The work takes advantage of AutoTest [5], an automatic testing framework which relies on the contracts already present in the software to serve as test oracles, and generates test cases automatically. AutoTest was applied to both to the classic EiffelBase, with classic partial contracts in the /A/ style, and to the more recent EiffelBase+ library, with strong contracts in the /B/ style. AutoTest is for Eiffel programs; to check for any language-specificity in the results the work also included testing a smaller set of classes from a C# library, DSA, for which a student developed a version (DSA+) equipped with strong model-based contracts. In that case the testing tool was Microsoft Research’s Pex [7]. The results are similar for both languages: citing from the paper, “the fault rates are comparable in the C# experiments, respectively 6 . 10^-3 and 3 . 10^-3 . The fault complexity is also qualitatively similar.”

The verdict on the effect of strong specifications as captured by automated testing is clear: the same automatic testing tools applied to the versions with strong contracts yield twice as many real faults. The term “real fault” comes from excluding spurious cases, such as specification faults (wrong specification, right implementation), which are a phenomenon worth studying but should not count as a benefit of the strong specification approach. The paper contains a detailed analysis of the various kinds of faults and the corresponding empirically determined measures. This particular analysis is for the Eiffel code, since in the C#/Pex case “it was not possible to get an evaluation of the faults by the original developers“.

In our experience the strong specifications are not that much harder to write. The paper contains a precise measure: about five person-weeks to create EiffelBase+, yielding an “overall benefit/effort ratio of about four defects detected per person-day“. Such a benefit more than justifies the effort. More study of that effort is needed, however, because the “person” in the person-weeks was not just an ordinary programmer. True, Eiffel experience has shown that most programmers quickly get the notion of contract and start applying it; as the saying goes in the community, “if you can write an if-then-else, you can write a contract”. But we do not yet have significant evidence of whether that observation extends to model-based contracts.

Model-based contracts (I prefer to call them “theory-based” because “model” means so many other things, but I do not think I will win that particular battle) are, in my opinion, a required component of the march towards program verification. They are the right compromise between simple contracts, which have proved to be attractive to many practicing programmers but suffer from incompleteness, and full formal specification à la Z, which say everything but require too much machinery. They are not an all-or-nothing specification technique but a progressive one: programmers can start with simple contracts, then extend and refine them as desired to yield exactly the right amount of precision and completeness appropriate in any particular context. The article shows that the benefits are well worth the incremental effort.

According to the ICSE program the talk will be presented in the formal specification session, Wednesday, May 22, 13:30-15:30, Grand Ballroom C.

References

[1] Nadia Polikarpova, Carlo A. Furia, Yu Pei, Yi Wei and Bertrand Meyer: What Good Are Strong Specifications?, to appear in ICSE 2013 (Proceedings of 35th International Conference on Software Engineering), San Francisco, May 2013, draft available here.

[2] Bertrand Meyer: Domain Theory: the forgotten step in program verification, article on this blog, see here.

[3] Bernd Schoeller, Tobias Widmer and Bertrand Meyer: Making Specifications Complete Through Models, in Architecting Systems with Trustworthy Components, eds. Ralf Reussner, Judith Stafford and Clemens Szyperski, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer-Verlag, 2006, available here.

[4] Nadia Polikarpova, Carlo Furia and Bertrand Meyer: Specifying Reusable Components, in Verified Software: Theories, Tools, Experiments (VSTTE ‘ 10), Edinburgh, UK, 16-19 August 2010, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer Verlag, 2010, available here.

[5] Bertrand Meyer, Ilinca Ciupa, Andreas Leitner, Arno Fiva, Yi Wei and Emmanuel Stapf: Programs that Test Themselves, IEEE Computer, vol. 42, no. 9, pages 46-55, September 2009, also available here.

[6] Bertrand Meyer, Ilinca Ciupa, Andreas Leitner, Arno Fiva, Yi Wei and Emmanuel Stapf: Programs that Test Themselves, in IEEE Computer, vol. 42, no. 9, pages 46-55, September 2009, also available here.

[7] Nikolai Tillman and Peli de Halleux, Pex: White-Box Generation for .NET, in Tests And Proofs (TAP 2008), pp. 134-153.

Since 2007 we have conducted, as part of a course at ETH, the DOSE project, Distributed and Outsourced Software Engineering, developed by cooperating student teams from a dozen universities around the world. We are finalizing the plans for the next edition, October to December 2013, and will be happy to welcome a few more universities.

The project consists of building a significant software system collaboratively, using techniques of distributed software development. Each university contributes a number of “teams”, typically of two or three students each; then “groups”, each made up of three teams from different universities, produce a version of the project.

The project’s theme has varied from year to year, often involving games. We make sure that the development naturally divides into three subsystems or “clusters”, so that each group can quickly distribute the work among its teams. An example of division into clusters, for a game project, is: game logic; database and player management; user interface. The page that describes the setup in more detail [1] has links enabling you to see the results of some of the best systems developed by students in recent years.

The project is a challenge. Students are in different time zones, have various backgrounds (although there are minimum common requirements [1]), different mother tongues (English is the working language of the project). Distributed development is always hard, and is harder in the time-constrained context of a university course. (In industry, while we do not like that a project’s schedule slips, we can often survive if it does; in a university, when the semester ends, we have to give students a grade and they go away!) It is typical, after the initial elation of meeting new student colleagues from exotic places has subsided and the reality of interaction sets in, that some groups will after a month, just before the first or second deadline, start to panic — then take matters into their own hands and produce an impressive result. Students invariably tell us that they learn a lot through the course; it is a great opportunity to practice the principles of modern software engineering and to get prepared for the realities of today’s developments in industry, which are in general distributed.

For instructors interested in software engineering research, the project is also a great way to study issues of distributed development in  a controlled setting; the already long list of publications arising from studies performed in earlier iterations [3-9] suggests the wealth of available possibilities.

Although the 2013 project already has about as many participating universities as in previous years, we are always happy to consider new partners. In particular it would be great to include some from North America. Please read the requirements on participating universities given in [1]; managing such a complex process is a challenge in itself (as one can easily guess) and all teaching teams must share goals and commitment.

References

[1] General description of DOSE, available here.

[2] Bertrand Meyer: Offshore Development: The Unspoken Revolution in Software Engineering, in Computer (IEEE), January 2006, pages 124, 122-123, available here.

[3] Bertrand Meyer and Marco Piccioni: The Allure and Risks of a Deployable Software Engineering Project: Experiences with Both Local and Distributed Development, in Proceedings of IEEE Conference on Software Engineering & Training (CSEE&T), Charleston (South Carolina), 14-17 April 2008, available here.

[4] Martin Nordio, Roman Mitin, Bertrand Meyer, Carlo Ghezzi, Elisabetta Di Nitto and Giordano Tamburelli: The Role of Contracts in Distributed Development, in Proceedings of Software Engineering Advances For Offshore and Outsourced Development, Lecture Notes in Business Information Processing 35, Springer-Verlag, 2009, available here.

[5] Martin Nordio, Roman Mitin and Bertrand Meyer: Advanced Hands-on Training for Distributed and Outsourced Software Engineering, in Proceedings of the 32nd ACM/IEEE International Conference on Software Engineering – Volume 1, ACM. 2010 available here.

[6] Martin Nordio, Carlo Ghezzi, Bertrand Meyer, Elisabetta Di Nitto, Giordano Tamburrelli, Julian Tschannen, Nazareno Aguirre and Vidya Kulkarni: Teaching Software Engineering using Globally Distributed Projects: the DOSE course, in Collaborative Teaching of Globally Distributed Software Development – Community Building Workshop (CTGDSD — an ICSE workshop), ACM, 2011, available here.

[7] Martin Nordio, H.-Christian Estler, Bertrand Meyer, Julian Tschannen, Carlo Ghezzi, and Elisabetta Di Nitto: How do Distribution and Time Zones affect Software Development? A Case Study on Communication, in Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Global Software Engineering (ICGSE), IEEE, pages 176–184, 2011, available here.

[8] H.-Christian Estler, Martin Nordio, Carlo A. Furia, and Bertrand Meyer: Distributed Collaborative Debugging, to appear in Proceedings of 7th International Conference on Global Software Engineering (ICGSE), 2013.

[9] H.-Christian Estler, Martin Nordio, Carlo A. Furia, and Bertrand Meyer: Unifying Configuration Management with Awareness Systems and Merge Conflict Detection, to appear in Proceedings of the 22nd Australasian Software Engineering Conference (ASWEC), 2013.

To inaugurate the “Reading Notes” series [1] I will take articles from the forthcoming International Conference on Software Engineering. Since I am not going to ICSE this year I am instead spending a little time browsing through the papers, obligingly available on the conference site. I’ll try whenever possible to describe a paper before it is presented at the conference, to alert readers to interesting sessions. I hope in July and August to be able to do the same for some of the papers to be presented at ESEC/FSE [2].

Please note the general disclaimer [1].

The Design of Bug Fixes [3] caught my attention partly for selfish reasons, since we are working, through the AutoFix project [3], on automatic bug fixing, but also out of sheer interest and because I have seen previous work by some of the authors. There have been article about bug patterns before, but not so much is known with credible empirical evidence about bug fixes (corrections of faults). When a programmer encounters a fault, what strategies does he use to correct it? Does he always produce the best fix he can, and if so, why not? What is the influence of the project phase on such decisions (e.g. will you fix a bug the same way early in the process and close to shipping)? These are some of the questions addressed by the paper.

The most interesting concrete result is a list of properties of bug fixes, classified along two criteria: nature of a fix (the paper calls it “design space”), and reasoning behind the choice of a fix. Here are a few examples of the “nature” classification:

• Data propagation: the bug arises in a component, fix it in another, for example a library class.
• More or less accuracy: are we fixing the symptom or the cause?
• Behavioral alternatives: rather than directly correcting the reported problem, change the user-experienced behavior (evoking the famous quip that “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature”). The authors were surprised to see that developers (belying their geek image) seem to devote a lot of effort trying to understand how users actually use the products, but also found that even so developers do not necessarily gain a solid, objective understanding of these usage patterns. It would be interesting to know if the picture is different for traditional locally-installed products and for cloud-based offerings, since in the latter case it is possible to gather more complete, accurate and timely usage data.

On the “reasoning” side, the issue is why and how programmers decide to adopt a particular approach. For example, bug fixes tend to be more audacious (implying redesign if appropriate) at the beginning of a project, and more conservative as delivery nears and everyone is scared of breaking something. Another object of the study is how deeply developers understand the cause rather than just the symptom; the paper reports that 18% “did not have time to figure out why the bug occurred“. Surprising or not, I don’t know, but scary! Yet another dimension is consistency: there is a tension between providing what might ideally be the best fix and remaining consistent with the design decisions that underlie a software system throughout its architecture.

I was more impressed by the individual categories of the classification than by that classification as a whole; some of the categories appear redundant (“interface breakage“, “data propagation” and “internal vs external“, for example, seem to be pretty much the same; ditto for “cause understanding” and “accuracy“). On the other hand the paper does not explicitly claim that the categories are orthogonal. If they turn this conference presentation into a journal article I am pretty sure they will rework the classification and make it more robust. It does not matter that it is a bit shaky at the moment since the main insights are in the individual kinds of fix and fix-reasoning uncovered by the study.

The authors are from Microsoft Research (one of them was visiting faculty) and interviewed numerous programmers from various Microsoft product groups to find out how they fix bugs.

The paper is nicely written and reads easily. It includes some audacious syntax, as in “this dimension” [internal vs external] “describes how much internal code is changed versus external code is changed as part of a fix“. It has a discreet amount of humor, some of which may escape non-US readers; for example the authors explain that when approaching programmers out of the blue for the survey they tried to reassure them through the words “we are from Microsoft Research, and we are here to help“, a wry reference to the celebrated comment by Ronald Reagan (or his speechwriter) that the most dangerous words in the English language are “I am from the government, and I am here to help“. To my taste the authors include too many details about the data collection process; I would have preferred the space to be used for a more detailed discussion of the findings on bug fixes. On the other hand we all know that papers to selective conferences are written for referees, not readers, and this amount of methodological detail was probably the minimum needed to get past the reviewers (by avoiding the typical criticism, for empirical software engineering research, that the sample is too small, the questions biased etc.). Thankfully, however, there is no pedantic discussion of statistical significance; the authors openly present the results as dependent on the particular population surveyed and on the interview technique. Still, these results seem generalizable in their basic form to a large subset of the industry. I hope their publication will spawn more detailed studies.

According to the ICSE program the paper will be presented on May 23 in the Debugging session, 13:30 to 15:30.

Notes and references

[1] This article review is part of the “Reading Notes” series. General disclaimer here.

[2] European Software Engineering Conference 2013, Saint Petersburg, Russia, 18-24 August, see here.

[3] Emerson Murphy-Hill, Thomas Zimmerman, Christian Bird and Nachiappan Nagapan: The Design of Bug Fixes, in ICSE 2013, available here.

[4] AutoFix project at ETH Zurich, see project page here.

[5] Ronald Reagan speech extract on YouTube.

The following presentations from our ETH group in the ICSE week (International Conference on Software Engineering, San Francisco) address important issues of software specification and verification, describing new techniques that we have recently developed as part of our work building EVE, the Eiffel Verification Environment. One is at ICSE proper and the other at VSTTE (Verified Software: Tools, Theories, Experiments). If you are around please attend them.

Julian Tschannen will present Program Checking With Less Hassle, written with Carlo A. Furia, Martin Nordio and me, at VSTTE on May 17 in the 15:30-16:30 session (see here in the VSTTE program. The draft is available here. I will write a blog article about this work in the coming days.

Nadia Polikarpova will present What Good Are Strong Specifications?, written with , Carlo A. Furia, Yu Pei, Yi Wei and me at ICSE on May 22 in the 13:30-15:30 session (see here in the ICSE program). The draft is available here. I wrote about this paper in an earlier post: see here. It describes the systematic application of theory-based modeling to the full specification and verification of advanced software.

Lack of a precise context can render discussions of software engineering and particularly of software quality meaningless. Take for example the (usually absurd) statement “We cannot expect that programmers will equip their programs with contracts”. Whom do you mean? A physicist who writes 50 lines of Matlab code to produce a graph illustrating his latest experiment? A member of the maintenance team for Microsoft Word? A programmer on the team for a flight control system? These are completely different constituencies, and the answer is also different. In the last case, the answer is probably that we do not care what the programmers like and do not like. When you buy an electrical device that malfunctions, would you accept from the manufacturer the excuse that differential equations are, really, you see, too hard for our electrical engineers?

In discussing the evolution of software methods and tools we must first specify what and whom we are talking about. The following ABC characterization is sufficient for most cases.

C is for Casual. Programs in that category do all kinds of useful things, and like anything else they should work properly, but if they are not ideal in software engineering terms of reliability, reusability, extendibility and so on — if sometimes they crash, sometimes produce not-quite-right results,  cannot be easily understood or maintained by anyone other than their original developers, target just one platform, run too slowly, eat up too much memory, are not easy to change, include duplicated code — it is not the end of the world. I do not have any scientific figures, but I suspect that most of the world’s software is actually in that category, from JavaScript or Python code that runs web sites to spreadsheet macros. Obviously it has to be good enough to serve its needs, but “good enough” is good enough.

B is for Business. Programs in that category run key processes in the organization. While often far from impeccable, they must satisfy strict quality constraints; if they do not, the organization will suffer significantly.

A is for Acute. This is life-critical software: if it does not work — more precisely, if it does not work exactly right — someone will get killed, someone will lose huge amounts of money, or something else will go terribly wrong. We are talking transportation systems, software embedded in critical devices, make-or-break processes of an organization.

Even in a professional setting, and even within a single company, the three categories usually coexist. Take for example a large engineering or scientific organization.  Some programs are developed to support experiments or provide an answer to a specific technical question. Some programs run the organization, both on the information systems side (enterprise management) and on the technical side (large scientific simulations, experiment set-up). And some programs play a critical role in making strategy decisions, or run the organization’s products.

The ABC classification is independent of the traditional division between enterprise and technical computing. Organizations often handle these two categories separately, whereas in fact they raise issues of similar difficulty and are subject to solutions of a similar nature. It is more important to assess the criticality of each software projects, along the ABC scale.

It is surprising that few organizations make that scale explicit.  It is partly a consequence of that neglect that many software quality initiatives and company-wide software engineering policies are ineffective: they lump everything together, and since they tend to be driven by A-grade applications, for which the risk of bad quality is highest, they create a burden that can be too high for C- and even B-grade developments. People resent the constraints where they are not justified, and as a consequence ignore them where they would be critical. Whether your goal for the most demanding projects is to achieve CMMI qualification or to establish an effective agile process, you cannot impose the same rules on everyone. Sometimes the stakes are high; and sometimes a program is just a program.

The first step in establishing a successful software policy is to separate levels of criticality, and require every development to position itself along the resulting scale. The same observation qualifies just about any discussion of software methodology. Acute, Business or Casual: you must know your ABC.

(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 nuggets from the gravel [1].

An interesting example is the emphasis on developing a system by successive increments covering expanding slices of user functionality. This urge to deliver something that can actually be shown — “Are we shipping yet?” — is excellent. It is effective in focusing the work of a team, especially once the foundations of the software have been laid. But does it have to be the only way of working? Does it have to exclude the time-honored engineering practice of building the infrastructure first? After all, when a building gets constructed, it takes many months before any  “user functionality” becomes visible.

In a typical exhortation [2], the Poppendiecks argue that:

The “right the first time“ approach may work for well-structured problems, but the “try-it, test-it, fix-it“ approach is usually the better approach for ill-structured problems.

Very strange. It is precisely ill-structured problems that require deeper analysis before you jump in into wrong architectural decisions which may require complete rework later on. Doing prototypes to try possible solutions can be a great way to evaluate potential solutions, but a prototype is an experiment, something quite different from an increment (an early version of the future system).

One of the problems with the agile literature is that its enthusiastic admonitions to renounce standard software engineering practices are largely based on triumphant anecdotes of successful projects. I am willing to believe all these anecdotes, but they are only anecdotes. In the present case systematic empirical evidence does not seem to support the agile view. Boehm and Turner [3] write:

Experience to date indicates that low-cost refactoring cannot be depended upon as projects scale up.

and

The only sources of empirical data we have encountered come from less-expert early adopters who found that even for small applications the percentage of refactoring and defect-correction effort increases with [the size of requirements].

They do not cite references here, and I am not aware of any empirical study that definitely answers the question. But their argument certainly fits my experience. In software as in engineering of any kind, experimenting with various solutions is good, but it is critical to engage in the appropriate Big Upfront Thinking to avoid starting out with the wrong decisions. Some of the worst project catastrophes I have seen were those in which the customer or manager was demanding to see something that worked right away — “it doesn’t matter if it’s not the whole thing, just demonstrate a piece of it!“ — and criticized the developers who worked on infrastructure that did not produce immediately visible results (in other words, were doing their job of responsible software professionals). The inevitable result: feel-good demos throughout the project, reassured customer, and nothing to deliver at the end because the difficult problems have been left to rot. System shelved and never to be heard of again.

When the basis has been devised right, perhaps with nothing much to show for months, then it becomes critical to insist on regular visible releases. Doing it prematurely is just sloppy engineering.

The problem here is extremism. Software engineering is a difficult balance between conflicting criteria. The agile literature’s criticism of teams that spend all their time on design or on foundations and never deliver any usable functionality is unfortunately justified. It does not mean that we have to fall into the other extreme and discard upfront thinking.

In the agile tradition of argument by anecdote, here is an extract from James Surowiecki’s  “Financial Page” article in last month’s New Yorker. It’s not about software but about the current Boeing 787 “Dreamliner” debacle:

Determined to get the Dreamliners to customers quickly, Boeing built many of them while still waiting for the Federal Aviation Administration to certify the plane to fly; then it had to go back and retrofit the planes in line with the FAA’s requirements. “If the saying is check twice and build once, this was more like build twice and check once”, [an industry analyst] said to me. “With all the time and cost pressures, it was an alchemist’s recipe for trouble.”

(Actually, the result is “build twice and check twice”, or more, since every time you rebuild you must also recheck.) Does that ring a bell?

Erich Kästner’s ditty about reaching America, cited in a previous article [5], is once again the proper commentary here.

References

[1] Bertrand Meyer: Agile! The Good, the Hype and the Ugly, Springer, 2013, to appear.

[2] Mary and Tom Poppendieck: Lean Software Development — An Agile Toolkit, Addison-Wesley, 2003.

[3] Barry W. Boehm and Richard Turner: Balancing Agility with Discipline — A Guide for the Perplexed, Addison-Wesley, 2004. (Second citation slightly abridged.)

[4] James Surowiecki, in the New Yorker, 4 February 2013, available here.

[5] Hitting on America, article from this blog, 5 December 2012, available here.

A core aspect of our verification work is the use of “strong” contracts, which express sophisticated specification properties without requiring a separate specification language: even for advanced properties, there is no need for a separate specification language, with special notations such as those of first-order logic; instead, one can continue to rely, in the tradition of Design by Contract, on the built-in notations of the programming language, Eiffel.

This is the idea of domain theory, as discussed in earlier posts on this blog, in particular [1]. An early description of the approach, part of Bernd Schoeller’s PhD thesis work, was [2]; the next step was [3], presented at VSTTE in 2010.

A new paper to be presented at ICSE in May [3], part of an effort led by Nadia Polikarpova for her own thesis in progress, shows new advances in using strong specifications, demonstrating their expressive power and submitting them to empirical evaluation. The results show in particular that strong specifications justify the extra effort; in particular they enable automatic tests to find significantly more bugs.

A byproduct of this work is to show again the complementarity between various forms of verification, including not only proofs but (particularly in the contribution of two of the co-authors, Yi Wei and Yu Pei, as well as Carlo Furia) tests.

References

[1] Bertrand Meyer: Domain Theory: the forgotten step in program verification, article on this blog, see here.

[2] Bernd Schoeller, Tobias Widmer and Bertrand Meyer: Making Specifications Complete Through Models, in Architecting Systems with Trustworthy Components, eds. Ralf Reussner, Judith Stafford and Clemens Szyperski, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer-Verlag, 2006, available here.

[3] Nadia Polikarpova, Carlo Furia and Bertrand Meyer: Specifying Reusable Components, in Verified Software: Theories, Tools, Experiments (VSTTE ‘ 10), Edinburgh, UK, 16-19 August 2010, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer Verlag, 2010, available here.

[4] Nadia Polikarpova, Carlo A. Furia, Yu Pei, Yi Wei and Bertrand Meyer: What Good Are Strong Specifications?, to appear in ICSE 2013 (Proceedings of 35th International Conference on Software Engineering), San Francisco, May 2013, draft available here.

As part of a Festschrift volume for Martin Glinz of the university of Zurich I wrote a paper [1] describing a general approach to requirements that I have been practicing and developing for a while, and presented in a couple of talks. The basic idea is to rely on object-oriented techniques, including contracts for the semantics, and to weave several levels of discourse: natural-language, formal and graphical.

Reference

[1] Bertrand Meyer: Multirequirements, to appear in Martin Glinz Festschrift, eds. Anne Koziolek and Norbert Scheyff, 2013, available here.

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 a time when the Russian software industry is ever more present through products and services offered worldwide. See the conference site here. The main conference will be held 21-23 August 2013, with associated events before and after so that the full dates are August 18 to 26. (I am the general chair.)

Other than ICSE, ESEC/FSE is second to none in the quality of the program. We already have four outstanding keynote speakers:  Georges Gonthier from Microsoft Research, Paola Inverardi from L’Aquila in Italy, David Notkin from U. of Washington (in whose honor a symposium will be held as an associated event of ESEC/FSE, chaired by Michael Ernst), and Moshe Vardi of Rice and of course Communications of the ACM.

Saint Petersburg is one of the most beautiful cities in the world, strewn with gilded palaces, canals, world-class museums (not just the Hermitage), and everywhere mementos of the great poets, novelists, musicians and scientists who built up its fame.

Hosted by ITMO National Research University, the conference will be held in the magnificent building of the Razumovsky Palace on the banks of the Moika river; see here.

The Call for Papers has a deadline of March 1st, so there is still plenty of time to polish your best paper and send it to ESEC/FSE. There is also still time to propose worskhops and other associated events. ESEC/FSE will be a memorable moment for the community and we hope to see many of the readers there.

It is a frequent complaint that production software contains too many features: “I use only  maybe 5% of Microsoft Word!“, with the implication that the other 95% are useless, and apparently without the consideration that maybe someone else needs them; how do you know that what is good enough for you is good enough for everyone?

The agile literature frequently makes this complaint against “software bloat“, and has turned it into a principle: build minimal software.

Is software really bloated? Rather than trying to answer this question it is useful to analyze where features come from. In my experience there are three sources: internal ideas; suggestions from the field; needs of key customers.

1. Internal ideas

A software system is always devised by a person or group, who have their own views of what it should offer. Many of the more interesting features come from these inventors and developers, not from the market. A competent group does not wait for users or prospects to propose features, but comes up with its own suggestions all the time.

This is usually the source of the most innovative ideas. Major breakthroughs do not arise from collecting customer wishes but from imagining a new product that starts from a new basis and proposing it to the market without waiting for the market to request it.

2. Suggestions from the field

Customers’ and prospects’ wishes do have a crucial role, especially for improvements to an existing product. A good marketing department will serve as the relay between the field’s wishes and the development team. Many such suggestions are of the “Check that box!” kind: customers and particularly prospects look at the competition and want to make sure that your product does everything that the others do. These suggestions push towards me-too features; they are necessary to keep up with the times, but must be balanced with suggestions from the other two sources, since if they were the only inspiration they would lead to a product that has the same functionality as everyone else’s, only delivered a few months later, not the best recipe for success.

3. Key customers

Every company has its key customers, those who give you so much business that you have to listen to them very carefully. If it’s Boeing calling, you pay more attention than to an unknown individual who has just acquired a copy. I suspect that many of the supposedly strange features, of products the ones that trigger “why would anyone ever need this?” reactions, simply come from a large customer who, at some point in the product’s history, asked for a really, truly, absolutely indispensable facility. And who are we — this includes Microsoft and Adobe and just about everyone else — to say that it is not required or not important?

It is easy to complain about software bloat, and examples of needlessly complex system abound. But your bloat may be my lifeline, and what I dismiss as superfluous may for you be essential. To paraphrase a comment by Ichbiah, the designer of Ada, small systems solve small problems. Outside of academic prototypes it is inevitable that  a successful software system will grow in complexity if it is to address the variety of users’ needs and circumstances. What matters is not size but consistency: maintaining a well-defined architecture that can sustain that growth without imperiling the system’s fundamental solidity and elegance.

I came across an obscure and surprisingly interesting article by Cliff Jones [1], about the history of rely-guarantee but with the following extract:

It was perhaps not fully appreciated at the time of [Hoare’s 1969 axiomatic semantics paper] that the roles of pre and post conditions differ in that a pre condition gives permission to a developer to ignore certain possibilities; the onus is on a user to prove that a component will not be initiated in a state that does not satisfy its pre condition. In contrast a post condition is an obligation on the code that is created according to the specification. This Deontic view carries over [to rely-guarantee reasoning].

I use words more proletarian than “deontic”, but this view is exactly what stands behind the concepts of Design by Contract and has been clearly emphasized in all Eiffel literature ever since the first edition of OOSC. It remains, however, misunderstood outside of the Eiffel community; many people confuse Design by Contract with its opposite, defensive programming. The criterion is simple: if you have a precondition to a routine, are you willing entirely to forsake the corresponding checks (conditionals, exceptions…) in the routine body? If not, you may be using the word “contract” as a marketing device, but that’s all. The courage to remove the checks is the true test of adulthood.

The application of Microsoft’s “Code Contracts” mechanism to the .NET libraries fails that test: a precondition may say “buffer not full” or “insertions allowed”, but the code still checks the condition and triggers an exception. The excuse I have heard is that one cannot trust those unwashed developers. But the methodological discipline is lost. Now let me repeat this using clearer terminology: it’s not deontic.

Reference

[1] Cliff Jones: The role of auxiliary variables in the formal development of concurrent programs, in Reflections on the work of C. A. R. Hoare, eds. Jones, Roscoe and Wood, Springer Lecture Notes in Computer Science,  2009, technical report version available here.

Since release 6.2 (November 2008) EiffelStudio has included the EIS system, Eiffel Information System. It has been regularly revised, and significantly improved for the recent 7.1 release.

For us EIS is a key contribution with far-reaching software engineering implications, but many users seem unaware of it, perhaps because we have not been explicit enough about why we think it is important. We would love to have more people try it and give us their feedback. (Please make sure to use the 7.1 version.) Information on EIS can be found in the documentation [1] and also in a blog entry by Tao Feng [2].

EIS connects an Eiffel system with external documents in arbitrary formats; examples of formats currently supported are Microsoft Word and PDF, but you can easily add protocols. Such a connection links an element of the Eiffel text, such as a feature, with an element of the external document, such as a paragraph. Then clicking the Eiffel element in EiffelStudio will open the document at the corresponding place in the external tool (Word, Acrobat etc.); this is the EIS “outgoing” mechanism. Conversely the external element has a back link: clicking in the external tool will open EiffelStudio at the right place; this is the EIS “incoming” mechanism.

For the outgoing mechanism, the link will appear as part of a note clause (with attributes filled by default, you need only edit the URL and any option that you wish to change):

The fundamental idea behind EIS is to support the seamless form of software development promoted and permitted by Eiffel, where all phases of a project’s lifecycle are closely linked and the code provides the ultimate reference. Since other documents are often involved, in particular a requirements document (SRS, Software Requirements Specification), it is essential to record their precise associations with elements of the software text. For example a paragraph in the SRS could state that “Whenever the tank temperature reaches 50 degrees, the valve shall be closed”. In the software text, there will be some feature, for example monitor_temperature in the class TANK, reflecting this requirement. The two elements should be linked, in particular to ensure that dependencies appear clearly and that any change in either the requirements or the code triggers the corresponding update to the other side. This is what EIS provides.

We envision further tools to track dependencies and in particular to warn users if an element of a connection (e.g. requirement or code) changes, alerting them to the need to check the linked elements on the other side. One of the key goals here is traceability: effective project management, particular during the evolution of a system, requires that all dependencies between the project’s artifact are properly recorded so that it is possible to find out the consequences of any change, proposed or carried out.

The general approach reflects the essential nature of Eiffel development, with its Single Product Principle linking all elements of a software system and minimizing, rather than exaggerating, the inevitable differences of levels of abstraction between requirements, design, code, test plans, test logs, schedules and all the other products of a software project. The core problem of software engineering is change: if we use different tools and notations at each step, and keep the documents separate, we constantly run the risk of divergence between intent and reality. Eiffel by itself offers a good part of the solution by providing a single method (with all its principles, from Design by Contract to open-closed etc.), a single notation (the Eiffel language itself) and a single integrated set of tools (the EiffelStudio IDE) supporting the entire lifecycle; the language, in particular is meant for requirements and design as much as for implementation. The graphical forms (BON and UML, as produced by the Diagram Tool of EiffelStudio in a roundtrip style, i.e. changes to the diagram immediately generate code and changes to the code are reflected in the diagram) directly support these ideas. Of course documents in other formalisms, for example SRS, remain necessary for human consumption; but they should be closely linked to the core project asset, the Eiffel code; hence the need for EIS and its connection mechanisms.

This approach, as I have often noted when presenting it in public, is hard to convey to people steeped in the mindset of the past (UML as separate from code, model-driven development) which magnify the differences between software levels, hence introducing the risk of divergence and making change painful. The Eiffel approach is innovative enough to cause incomprehension or even rejection. (“What, you are not model-driven, but everyone says model-driven is good!” – well, models are bad if they are inaccurate. In the Eiffel approach the model and the program are the same thing, or more precisely the model is the abstract view of the program, obtained through abstraction mechanisms such as deferred classes with contracts and the “contract view” tool of EiffelStudio.)

To be effective, these ideas require proper tool support, for which EIS is a start. But we would like to know if we are on the right track and hence need feedback. We would be grateful if you could try out EIS and tell us what you think, both about the current state of the mechanism and its long-term prospects in the general framework of high-quality, sustainable software development.

References

[1] EIS documentation, here.

[2] Tao Feng, Start using Eiffel Information System, Eiffelroom blog entry of 17 April 2008, available here.

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 introduction to program verification, you will be told that the task requires two artifacts: a program, and a specification. The program describes what executions will do; the specification, what they are supposed to do. To verify software is to ascertain that the program matches the specification: that it does is what it should.

The consequence usually drawn is that verification consists of three steps: write a specification, write a program, prove that the program satisfies the specification. The practical process is of course messier, if only because the first two steps may occur in the reverse order and, more generally, all three steps are often intertwined: the specification and the program influence each other, in particular through the introduction of “verification conditions” into the program; and initial proof attempts will often lead to changes in both the specification and the program. But by and large these are the three accepted steps.

Such a description misses a fourth step, a prerequisite to specification that is essential to a scalable verification process: Domain Theory. Any program addresses a specific domain of discourse, be it the domain of network access and communication for a mobile phone system, the domain of air travel for a flight control system, of companies and shares for a stock exchange system and so on. Even simple programs with a limited scope, such as the computation of the maximum of an array, use a specific domain beyond elementary mathematics. In this example, it is the domain of arrays, with their specific properties: an array has a range, a minimum and maximum indexes in that range, an associated sequence of values; we may define a slice a [i..j], ask for the value associated with a given index, replace an element at a given index and so on. The Domain Theory provides a formal model for any such domain, with the appropriate mathematical operations and their properties. In the example the operations are the ones just mentioned, and the properties will include the axiom that if we replace an element at a certain index i with a value v then access the element at an index j, the value we get is v if i = j, and otherwise the earlier value at j.

2. The role of a Domain Theory

The task of devising a Domain Theory is to describe such a domain of reference, in the spirit of abstract data types: by listing the applicable operations and their properties. If we do not treat this task as a separate step, we end up with the kind of specification that works for toy examples but quickly becomes unmanageable for real-life applications. Most of the verification literature, unfortunately, relies on such specifications. They lack abstraction since they keep using the lowest-level mathematical objects and constructs, such as numbers and quantified expressions. They are to specification what assembly language is to modern programming.

Dines Bjørner has for a long time advocated a closely related idea, domain engineering; see for example his book in progress [1]. Unfortunately, he does not take advantage of modularization through abstract data types; the book is an example of always-back-to-the-basics specification, resorting time and again to fully explicit specifications based on a small number of mathematical primitives, and as a consequence making formal specification look difficult.

3. Maximum computed from both ends

As a simple example of modeling through an abstract theory consider an algorithm for computing the maximum of an array. We could use the standard technique that goes through the array one-way, but for variety let us take the algorithm that works from both ends, moving two integer cursors towards each other until they meet.  (This example was used in a verification competition at a recent conference, I forgot which one.) The code looks like this:

The specification, expressed by the postcondition (ensure) should state that Result is the maximum of the array; the loop invariant will be closely related to it. How do we express these properties? The obvious way is not the right way. It states the postcondition as something like

∀ k: Z | (k ≥ a.lower ∧ k ≤ a.upper) ⇒ a [k] ≤ Result

∃ k: Z | k ≥ a.lower ∧ k ≤ a.upper ∧ a [k] = Result

In words, Result is at least as large as every element of the array, and is equal to at least one of the elements of the array. The invariant can also be expressed in this style (try it).

The preceding specification expresses the desired property, but it is of an outrageously lower level than called for. The notion of maximum is a general one for arrays over an ordered type. It can be computed through many different algorithms in addition to the one shown above, and exists independently of these algorithms. The detailed, assembly-language-like definition of its properties should not have to be repeated in every case. It should be part of the Domain Theory for the underlying notion, arrays.

4. A specification at the right level of abstraction

In a Domain Theory for arrays of elements from an ordered set, one of the principal operations is maximum, satisfying the above properties. The definition of maximum through these properties belongs at the Domain Theory level. The Domain Theory should include that definition, independent of any particular computational technique such as two_way_max. Then the routine’s postcondition, relying on this notion from the Domain Theory, becomes simply

Result = a.maximum

The application of this approach to the loop invariant is particularly interesting. If you tried to write it at the lowest level, as suggested above, you should have produced something like this:

a.lower ≤ i ≤ j ≤ a.upper

∃ k: Z | k ≥ i ∧ k ≤ j ∧ (∀ l: Z | l ≥ a.lower ∧ l ≤ a.upper ⇒ a [l] ≤ a [k])

The first clause is appropriate but the rest is horrible! With its nested quantified expressions it gives an impression of great complexity for a property that is in fact straightforward, simple enough in fact to be explained to a 10-year-old: the maximum of the entire array can be found between indexes i and j. In other words, it is also the maximum of the array slice going from i to j. The Domain Theory will define the notion of slice and enable us to express the invariant as just

a.lower ≤ i ≤ j ≤ a.upper — This bounding clause remains

a.maximum = (a [i..j ]).maximum

(where we will write the slice a [i..j ] as a.slice (i, j ) if we do not have mechanisms for defining special syntax). To verify the routine becomes trivial: on loop exit the invariant still holds and i = j, so the maximum of the entire array is given by the maximum of the single-element slice a [i..i ], which is the value of its single element a [i ]. This last property — the maximum of a single-element array is its single value — is independent of the verification of any particular program and should be proved as a little theorem of the Domain Theory for arrays.

The comparison between the two versions is striking: without Domain Theory, we are back to the most tedious mathematical manipulations again and again; simple, clear properties look complicated and obscure. This just for a small example on basic data structures; now think what it will be for a complex application domain. Without a first step of formal modeling to develop a Domain Theory, no realistic specification and verification process is realistic.

Although the idea is illustrated here through examples of individual routines, the construction of a Domain Theory should usually occur, in an object-oriented development process, at the level of a class: the embodiment of an abstract data type, which is at the appropriate level of granularity. The theory applies to objects of a given type, and hence will be used for the verification of all operations of that type. This observation justifies the effort of devising a Domain Theory, since it will benefit a whole set of software elements.

5. Components of a Domain Theory

The Domain Theory should include the three ingredients illustrated in the example:

• Operations, modeled as mathematical functions (no side effects of course, we are in the world of specification).
• Axioms characterizing the defining properties of these operations.
• Theorems, characterizing other important properties.

This approach is of course nothing else than abstract data types (the same thing, although few people realize it, as object-oriented analysis). Even though ADTs are a widely popularized notion, supported for example by tools such as CafeOBJ [2] and Maude [3], it is generally not taken to its full conclusions; in particular there is too often a tendency to define every new ADT from scratch, rather than building up libraries of reusable high-level mathematical components in the O-O spirit of reuse.

6. Results, not just definitions

In devising a Domain Theory with the three kinds of ingredient listed above, we should not forget the last one, the theorems! The most depressing characteristic of much of the work on formal specification is that it is long on definitions and short on results, while good mathematics is supposed to be the reverse. I think people who have seriously looked at formal methods and do not adopt them are turned off not so much by the need to use mathematics but by the impression they get little value for it.

That is why Eiffel contracts do get adopted: even if it’s just for testing and debugging, people see immediate returns. It suffices for a programmer to have caught one bug as the violation of a simple postcondition to be convinced for life and lose any initial math-phobia.

7. Quantifiers are evil

As we go beyond simple contract properties — this argument must be positive, this reference will not be void — the math needs to be at the same level of abstraction to which, as modern programmers, we are accustomed. For example, one should always be wary of program specifications relying directly on quantified expressions, as in the low-level variants of the postcondition and loop invariant of the two_way_max routine.

This is not just a matter of taste, as in the choice in logic [4] between lambda expressions (more low-level but also more immediately understandable) and combinators (more abstract but, for many, more abstruse). We are talking here about the fundamental software engineering problem of scalability; more generally, of the understandability, extendibility and reusability of programs, and the same criteria for their specification and verification. Quantifiers are of course needed to express fundamental properties of a structure but in general should not directly appear in program assertions: as the example illustrated, their level of abstraction is lower than the level of discourse of a modern object-oriented program. If the rule — Quantifiers Considered Harmful — is not absolute, it must be pretty close.

Quantified expressions, “All elements of this structure possess this property” and “Some element of this structure possesses this property” — belong in the description of the structure and not in the program. They should appear in the Domain Theory, not in the verification. If you want to express that a hash table search found an element of key K, you should not write

(Result = Void ∧ (∀ i: Z | i ≥ a.lower ∧ i ≤ a.upper ⇒ a.item (i).key ≠ K))
∨
(Result ≠ Void ∧ (∀ i: Z | i ≥ a.lower ∧ i ≤ a.upper ∧ a.item (i).key = K ∧ Result = a.item (i))

but

Result /= Void   ⇔   (Result ∈ a.elements_of_key (K))

The quantified expressions will appear in the Domain Theory for the corresponding structure, in the definition of such domain properties as elements_of_key. Then the program’s specification — the contracts to be verified — can rely on concepts that make sense to the programmer; the verification will take advantage of theorems that have been proved independently since they belong to the Domain Theory and do not depend on individual programs.

8. Even the simplest examples…

Practical software verification requires Domain Theory even in the simplest cases, including those often used as purely academic examples. Perhaps the most common (and convenient) way to explain the notion of loop invariant is Euclid’s algorithm to compute the greatest common divisor (gcd) of two numbers (with a structure remarkably similar to that of two_way_max):

I have expressed the postcondition using a concept from an assumed Domain Theory for the underlying problem: gcd, the mathematical function that yields the greatest common divisor of two integers. Many specifications I have seen go back to the basics, with something like this (using \\ for integer remainder):

a \\ Result = 0 ∧ b \\ Result = 0 ∧  ∀ i: N | (a \\ i = 0) ∧ (b \\ i = 0) ⇒  i ≤ Result

This is indeed the definition of what it means for Result to be the gcd of a and b (it divides a, it divides b, and is greater than any other integer that also has these two properties). But it makes no sense to include such a detailed mathematical property in the specification of a program element. It belongs in the domain theory, where it will serve as the definition of a function gcd, which we can then use directly in the specification of the program.

Note how the invariant makes the necessity of the Domain Theory approach even more clear: try to express it in the basic mathematical form, not using the function gcd, It can be done, but the result is typical of the high complexity to usefulness ratio of traditional formal specifications mentioned above. Instead, the invariant that I have included in the program text above says exactly what there is to say, clearly and concisely: at each iteration, the gcd of our two temporary values, i and j, is the result that we are seeking, the gcd of the original values a and b. On exit from the loop, when i and j are equal, their common value is that result.

It is also thanks to the Domain Theory modeling that the verification of the program — consisting of proving that the stated property is indeed invariant — will be so simple: as part of the theory, we should have the two little theorems

i > j > 0 ⇒ gcd (i, j) = gcd (i –j, j)
gcd (i, i) = i

which immediately show the implementation to be correct.

Inside of any big, fat, messy, quantifier-ridden specification there is a simple, elegant and clear Domain-Theory-based specification desperately trying to get out. Find it and use it.

9. From Domain Theory to domain library

One of the reasons most people working on program verification have not used the division into levels of discourse described here, with a clear role for developing a Domain Theory, is that they lack the appropriate notational support. Mathematical notation is of course available, but we are talking about programs a general verification framework cannot resort to a new special notation for every new application domain.

This is one of the places where Eiffel provides a consistent solution, through its seamless approach to integrating programs and specifications in a single notation. Thanks to mechanisms such as deferred classes (classes that describe concepts through detailed specifications without committing to an implementation), Eiffel is as much for specification as for design and implementation; a Domain Theory can be expressed though a set of deferred Eiffel classes, which we may call a domain library. The classes in a domain library should not just be deferred, meaning devoid of implementation; they should in addition describe stateless operations only — queries, not commands — since they are modeling purely mathematical concepts.

An earlier article in this blog [5] outlined the context of our verification work: the EVE project (Eiffel Verification Environment), a practical approach to integrating software verification in the day-to-day practice of modern software development, with the slogan ““Verification As a Matter Of Course”. In this project we have applied the idea of Domain Theory by building a domain library covering fundamental concepts of set theory, including functions and relations. This is the Mathematical Model Library (MML) [6, 7], which we use to verify the new data structure library EiffelBase 2 using specifications at the appropriate level of abstraction.

MML is in fact useful for the specification of a wide variety of programs, since almost every application area can benefit from the general concepts of set, subset, relation and such. But to cover a specific application domain, say flight traffic control, MML will generally not suffice; you will need to devise a Domain Theory that mathematically models the target domain, and may express it in the form of a domain library written in the same general spirit as MML: all deferred, stateless, focused on high-level abstractions.

It is one of the attractions of Eiffel that you can express such a theory and library in the same notation as the programs that will use it — more precisely in a subset of that notation, since the specification classes do not need the imperative constructs of the language such as instructions and attributes. Then both the development process and the verification use a seamlessly integrated set of notations and techniques, and all use the same tools from a modern IDE, in our case EiffelStudio, for browsing, editing, working with graphical repreentation, metrics etc.

10. DSL libraries for specifications

A mechanism to express Domain Theories is to a general specification mechanism essentially like a Domain Specific Language (DSL) is to a general programming language: a specialization for a particular domain. Domain libraries make the approach practical by:

• Embedding the specification language in the programming language.
• Fundamentally relying on reuse, in the best spirit of object technology.

This approach is in line with the one I presented for handling DSLs in an earlier article of this blog [8] (thanks, by the way, for the many comments received, some of them posted here and some on Facebook and LinkedIn where the post triggered long discussions). It is usually a bad idea to invent a new language for a new application domain. A better solution is to rely on libraries, by taking advantage of the power of object-oriented mechanisms to model (in domain libraries) and implement (for DSLs) the defining features of such a domain, and to make the result widely reusable. The resulting libraries are purely descriptive in the case of a domain library expressing a Domain Theory, and directly usable by programs in the case of a library embodying a DSL, but the goal is the same.

11. A sound and necessary engineering practice

Many ideas superficially look similar to Domain Theory: domain engineering as mentioned above, “domain analysis” as widely discussed in the requirements literature, model-driven development, abstract data type specification… They all start from some of the same observations, but  Domain Theory as described in this article is something different: a systematic approach to modeling an arbitrary application domain mathematically, which:

• Describes the concepts through applicable operations, axioms and (most importantly) theorems.
• Expresses these elements in an applicative (side-effect free, i.e. equivalent to pure mathematics) subset of the programming language, for direct embedding in program specifications.
• Relies on the class mechanism to structure the results.
• Collects the specifications into specification libraries and promotes the reuse of specifications in the same way we promote software reuse.
• Uses the combination of these techniques to ensure that program specifications are at a high level of abstraction, compatible with the programmers’ view of their software.
• Promotes a clear and effective verification process.

The core idea is in line with standard engineering practices in disciplines other than software: to build a bridge, a car or a chip you need first to develop a sound model of the future system and its environment, using any useful models developed previously rather than always going back to elementary textbook mathematics.

It seems in fact easier to justify doing Domain Analysis than to justify not doing it. The power of expression and abstraction of our programs has grown by leaps and bounds; it’s time for our specifications to catch up.

References

[1] Dines Bjørner: From Domains to Requirements —The Triptych Approach to Software Engineering, “to be submitted to Springer”, available here.

[2] Kokichi Futatsugi and others: CafeObj page, here.

[3] José Meseguer and others: Maude publication page, here.

[4] J. Roger Hindley, J. P. Seldin: Introduction to Combinators and l-calculus, Cambridge University Press, 1986.

[5] Verification As a Matter Of Course, earlier article on this blog (March 2010), available here.

[6] Bernd Schoeller, Tobias Widmer and Bertrand Meyer. Making specifications complete through models, in Architecting Systems with Trustworthy Components, eds. Ralf Reussner, Judith Stafford and Clemens Szyperski, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer-Verlag, 2006, pages 48-70, available here.

[7] Nadia Polikarpova, Carlo A. Furia and Bertrand Meyer: Specifying Reusable Components, in VSTTE’10: Verified Software: Theories, Tools and Experiments, Edinburgh, August 2010, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Springer-Verlag, available here.

[8] Never Design a Language, earlier article on this blog (January 2012), available here.

In April we will be starting the  “Concurrency Made Easy” research project, the result of a just announced Advanced Investigator Grant from the European Research Council. Such ERC grants are awarded to a specific person, rather than a consortium of research organizations as in the usual EU funding scheme. The usual amount, which applies in my case, is 2.5 million euros (currently almost 3 .3 million dollars) over five years, on a specific theme. According to the ERC’s own description [1],

ERC Advanced Grants allow exceptional established research leaders of any nationality and any age to pursue ground-breaking, high-risk projects that open new directions in their respective research fields or other domains.

This is the most sought-after research funding instrument of the EU, with a success rate of about 12% [2], out of a group already preselected by the host institutions. What makes ERC Advanced Investigator Grants so coveted is the flexibility of the scheme (no constraints on the topic, light administrative baggage) and the trust that an award implies in a particular researcher and his ability to carry out advanced research.

The name of the CME project clearly signals its ambition: to turn concurrent programming into a normal, unheroic part of programming. Today adding concurrency to a program, usually in the form of multithreading, is very hard, complexity and risk of all kinds. Everyone is telling us that we must rethink programming, retrain programmers and revamp curricula to put the specific reasoning modes of concurrent programming at the center. I don’t think this can work; thinking concurrently is just too hard to become the default mode. Instead, we should adapt programming languages, theories and tools so that programmers can continue to apply the reasoning schemes that have proved so successful in classical programming, especially object-oriented programming with the benefit of Design by Contract.

The starting point is the SCOOP model, to which I started an introduction in an earlier article of this blog [3], with a sequel yet to come. SCOOP is a minimal extension to the O-O framework to support concurrency, yielding very simple (the S in the acronym) solutions to concurrent programming problems. As part of the CME project we plan to develop it in many different directions and establish a sound and effective formal basis.

I have put the project description — the scientific part of the actual proposal text accepted by the ERC — online [4].

In the next few weeks I will be publishing here specific announcements for the positions we are seeking to fill very quickly; they include postdocs, PhD students, and one research engineer. We are looking for candidates with excellent knowledge and practice of concurrency, Eiffel, formal techniques etc. The formal application procedure will be Web-based and is not in place yet but you can contact me if you fit the profile and are interested.

We can defeat the curse: concurrent programming (an obligatory condition of any path towards a successful future for information technology) does not have to be black magic. It can be made simple and efficient. Such is the challenge of the CME project.

References

[1] European Research Council: Advanced Grants, available here.

[2] European Research Council: Press release on 2011 Advanced Investigator Grants, 24 January 2012, available here.

[3] Concurrent Programming is Easy, article from this blog, available here.

[4] CME Advanced Investigator Grant project description, available here.

It is a common occurrence in software development. Someone says: “We should design a language”. The usual context is that some part of the development requires a rich functionality set, and it appears appropriate to provide a flexible solution through a specialized language. As an example, in the development of an airline’s frequent flyer program on which I once worked the suggestion came to design a “Flyer Award Language” , with instructions appropriate for that application domain: record a trip, redeem an award, provide a statement of available miles and so on. A common term for such notations is DSL, for Domain-Specific Language.

Designing a language in such a context is almost always a bad idea (and I am not sure why I wrote “almost”). Languages are endless objects of discussion, usually on the least important aspects, which are also the most visible and those on which everyone has a strong opinion: concrete syntactic properties. People might pretend otherwise (“let’s not get bogged down on syntax, this is just one possible form”) but syntax is what the discussions will get bogged down to — keywords or symbols, this order or that order of operands, one instruction with several variants vs. several instructions… — at the expense of discussing the fundamental issues of functionality.

Worse yet, even if a language will be part of the solution it is usually just one facet to the solution. As was already explained in detail in [1], any useful functionality set will naturally be useful through several interfaces: a textual notation with concrete syntax may be one of them, but other possible ones include an API (Abstract Program Interface) for use from other software elements, a Graphical User Interface, a web user interface, yet another for web services (typically WSDL or some other XML or JSON format).

In such cases, starting with a concrete textual language is pretty silly, since it cannot yield the others directly (it would have to be parsed and further analyzed, which does not make sense). Of all the kinds of interface listed, the most fundamental one is the API: it describes the raw functionality, excluding any choice of syntax but including, thanks to contracts, elements of semantics. For example, a class AWARD in our frequent flyer application might include the feature

             redeem_for_upgrade (c: CUSTOMER; f : FLIGHT)
                                     — Upgrade c to next class of service on f.
                       require
                                    c /= holder implies holder.allowed_substitute (c)
                                    f.permitted_for_upgrade (Current)
                                    c.booked ( f )
                        ensure
                                    c.class_of_service ( f ) =  old c.class_of_service ( f ) + 1

There is of course no implementation as this declaration only specifies an interface, but it says what needs to be said: to redeem the award for an upgrade, the intended customer must be either the holder of the award or an allowed substitute; the flight must be available for an upgrade with the current award (including the availability of enough miles); the intended customer must already be booked on the flight; and the upgrade will be for the next class of service.

These details are the kind of things that need to be discussed and agreed before the API is finalized. Then one can start discussing about a textual form (a DSL), a graphical interface, a web services interface. They all consist of relatively simple layers to be superimposed on a solidly defined and precisely specified basis. Once you have that basis, you can have all the fun you like arguing over everyone’s favorite forms of concrete syntax; it cannot hurt the project any more. Having these discussions early, at the expense of the more fundamental issues, is a great danger.

One of the key rules for successful software construction — as for many other ventures of course, especially in science and technology — is to distinguish the essential from the auxiliary, and consequently to devote proper attention to the essential issues while avoiding disputations of auxiliary issues. To define functionality, API is essential; language is auxiliary.

So when should you design a language? Never. Well, hardly ever.

Reference

[1] Bertrand Meyer: Introduction to the Theory of Programming Languages, Prentice Hall, 1990.