Bertrand Meyer's technology+ blog
Software engineering, programming methodology, languages, verification, general technology, publication culture, and more
We “core” computer scientists and software engineers always whine that our research themes forever prevent us, to the delight of our physicist colleagues but unjustly, from reaching the gold standard of academic recognition: publishing in Nature. I think I have broken this barrier now by disproving the old, dusty laws of physics! Brace yourself for … Read more
One of the most significant recent developments in software engineering is the concept of Devops*. Dismissing the idea as “just the latest buzzword” would be wrong. It may be a buzzword but it reflects a fundamental change in the way we structure system development; with web applications in particular the traditional distinctions between steps of … Read more
Many programs take “execution arguments” which the program users provide at the start of execution. In EiffelStudio you can enter them under Execution -> Execution parameters. The program can access them through the Kernel Library class ARGUMENTS. Typically, the root class of the system inherits from ARGUMENTS and its creation procedure will include something like … Read more
Just about a year ago I posted this announcement about my just released Agile course: In spite of all the interest in both agile methods and MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) there are few courses on agile methods; I know only of some specialized MOOCs focused on a particular language or method. I produced for … Read more
As part of the continuation of the ERC Advanced Investigator Grant project “Concurrency Made Easy” (started at ETH Zurich, see the project pages at cme.ethz.ch), I have positions at Politecnico di Milano for: Postdocs (having a doctoral degree) Research associates (officially: “Assegno di Ricerca”, with the requirement of having a master degree), which can lead … Read more
Microsoft Office tools offer features for (1) spelling correction and (2) multi-language support. They are not very good at working together, another example of the perils of feature interaction. Spelling correction will by default when misspelled, but in the case of common misspellings known to the tools it will simply correct words without bothering the … Read more
One of the most delicate aspects of design is feature interaction. As users, we suffer daily from systems offering features that individually make sense but clash with each other. In my agile book [1] I explained in detail, building on the work of Pamela Zave, why this very problem makes one of the key ideas … Read more
The AutoProof technology pursues the goal of “Verification As a Matter Of Course”, integrated into the EVE development environment. (The AutoProof project page here; see particularly the online interactive tutorial.) A one-day workshop devoted to the existing AutoProof and current development will take place on October 1 near Toulouse in France. It is an informal … Read more
In spite of all the interest in both agile methods and MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses) there are few courses on agile methods; I know only of some specialized MOOCs focused on a particular language or method. I produced for EdX, with the help of Marco Piccioni, a new MOOC entitled Agile Software Development. It … Read more
Many robotics applications are by nature concurrent; in his ongoing PhD work, Andrey Rusakov [1] is building a comprehensive concurrent robot programming framework, Roboscoop [2], based on the SCOOP model for simple concurrent object-oriented programming [3] and the Ros operating system. As part of this work it is important to know how much robotics applications … Read more