Bertrand Meyer's technology+ blog

Today (well, tomorrow as of writing, but when you see this it will probably be today for you) I am participating in a panel discussion with Ivar Jacobson, Robert Martin and Carlos Zapata on “The Future of Methods”, hosted by the SEMAT/Essence movement. It takes place at 18:30 CET (i.e. Paris/Zurich etc.), 12:30 EDT, 9:30 in California. It’s free, but requires registration at https://www.meetup.com/essence-for-agility/events/280316615/.

Should be a good discussion!

This Wednesday (still “tomorrow” as I am writing this), 10 March 2021, I am giving a talk on “The Beauty of Software” on the occasion of the graduation ceremony of the first students of the Schaffhausen Institute of Technology. The event starts at 17 Schaffhausen/Zurich/Paris etc. time (11 AM New York, 8 AM San Francisco) and my own talk, starting half an hour later, will take about one hour.

The talk is (surprise!) given online. Registration is free but required: you can find the registration form on the announcement page here.

The abstract appears below. It is rather ambitious-sounding and I cannot promise the talk will live up to the promise, but I feel it necessary at least to attempt some initial steps towards a better understanding of beauty in software, which might help understand beauty in general.

The Beauty of Software

Software runs the world and delivers riches. Every passionate software engineer or computer scientist is also attuned to another of its features: the study and practice of software construction reveal gems of utter beauty.

While the concept of beauty is most naturally associated with art, scientists and engineers of all fields often invoke it. Beauty is a strong guiding principle in searching for solutions to scientific and technical problems, and arbitrating between rival candidate solutions. The reaction is often instinctive: “What an elegant theory!” “This technique is too ugly to be a viable approach”.

What do such appeals to beauty really mean? Do they pertain to the same concept of beauty as found in nature and art? Is beauty only “in the eye of the beholder”, is it conditioned by cultural prejudices, or does it submit to an objective definition?

In this talk, an initial step towards a more extensive study of what beauty means for software, I will present a few artifacts from software engineering and computer science which I find strikingly beautiful and – at the risk of breaking the charm – analyze what might make them so. This analysis will lead to a tentative definition of a notion both alluring and elusive: beauty.

In the software engineering family requirements engineering is in my experience the poor cousin, lagging behind the progress of other parts (such as design). I have been devoting attention to the topic in recent months and am completing a book on the topic.

Tomorrow (Thursday), I will be covering some of the material in a one-hour Tech Talk for ACM, with the title

The Four PEGS of Requirements Engineering

The time is Thursday, 4 March 2021, at noon EDT (New York) and 18 CET (Paris, Zurich etc.). Attendance is free but requires registration, on the event page  here.

Abstract:

Bad software requirements can jeopardize projects. There is a considerable literature on requirements, but practice is far behind: what passes for requirements in industry usually consists of a few use cases or user stories, which are useful but not sufficient as a solution. Can we fix requirements engineering (known in other circles as business analysis) so that it is no longer the weak link in software engineering?

I will present ongoing work intended to help industry produce more useful requirements. It includes precise definitions of requirements concepts and a standard plan for requirements specifications, intended to replace the venerable but woefully obsolete IEEE standard from 1998. The plan contains four books covering the four “PEGS” of requirements engineering (which I will explain). The approach builds on existing knowledge to define a practical basis for requirements engineering and provide projects with precise and helpful guidelines.

This is I think the fourth time I am giving talks in this venue (previous talks were about Design by Contract, Agile Methods and Concurrency).

On April 29 in the early evening at the Schaffhausen Institute of Technology I will give a talk on “The Beauty of Software”, exploring examples of what makes some concepts, algorithms, data structures etc. produce a sense of esthetics. (Full abstract below.) I gave a first version at TOOLS last year but am revising and expanding the talk extensively.

I obviously have my own examples but am interested in more. If you have some that you feel should be considered for inclusion, perhaps because you experienced a “Wow!” effect when you encountered them, please tell me. I am only asking for names or general pointers, not an in-depth analysis (that’s my job). To avoid having my thunder stolen I would prefer that you alert me by email. I will give credit for examples not previously considered.

Thanks!

Abstract of the talk as published:

I am giving a “distinguished lecture” at the University of California, Santa Barbara, January 10 (Friday, tomorrow) at 14. The title is A Comprehensive Approach to Requirements Engineering.

The abstract and rest of the information are here.

I will spend the last few minutes of the talk discussing other current developments (verification, concurrency).

The “Morgenstern Colloquium” at the University of Nice / INRIA Sophia Antipolis invited me to give a talk, next Wednesday (18 December) at 11 in Sophia Antipolis, in the aptly named* “Kahn Building”. The announcement appears here. I proposed various topics but (pleasant surprise) the organizers explicitly asked me to lecture about what I really want to talk about: the Eiffel approach. I will give a general presentation describing not specifically the language but the unified view of software construction embodied in Eiffel, from modeling to requirements to design, implementation and verification. Here is the abstract:

With society’s growing reliance on IT systems, the ability to write high-quality software is ever more critical. While a posteriori verification techniques have their role, there is no substitute for methods and tools that provide built-in quality (“correctness by construction”) and scale up to very large systems. For several decades my colleagues and I have been building such a method, based in particular on the concept of Design by Contract, the associated tools and the supporting language, Eiffel. The scope is wide, encompassing all aspects of the software development process, from requirements and design to implementation and verification. I will present an overview of the approach, show what it can yield, and discuss remaining open issues.

This talk is meant for everyone, whether from industry or academia, with an interest in practical techniques for engineering high-quality software.

No registration is required. The presentation will be in English.

Note

*Gilles Kahn, a brilliant computer scientist who died too young, was for a while director of INRIA.

December 16 (next Monday), the newly created Schaffhausen Institute of Technology organizes an entire day of events around three (no less) talks by the physics Nobel prize winner and MIT professor Wolfgang Ketterle.

The culmination of the day is a talk by Prof. Ketterle in the evening on “What happened to the kilogram?”. From the abstract:

For 130 years, a cylinder made of a platinum-iridium alloy stored in Saint-Cloud near Paris was the official definition of a kilogram, the basic unit of mass. This all changed on May 20 of this year: a kilo is now be defined by a fundamental constant of nature known, the Planck constant, which relates the energy of a photon to its frequency: 6.62607015 times 10-34 kilograms times square meters per second. Try that the next time you buy a kilo of asparagus.

Sounds complicated? For MIT’s Wolfgang Ketterle, a Nobel Prize winner, “Conceptually, the definition is very simple”.

Simple? Really? Come to Schaffhausen and hear for yourself whether Prof. Ketterle can make the new kilogram crystal-clear to common mortals.

Earlier in the day, he will give a talk in German on new forms of materials that appear at temperatures near the absolute zero, complete with demonstrations.

More generally, there is a full set of talks throughout the day about various aspects of advanced physics and computer science, and even a “quantum magician”, plus music and food.

Schaffhausen is about 40 minutes from Zurich (or Zurich airport) by train or car.

Attendance is free but registration is recommended. One can register for the full day or for some events only. See further information and registration form here.

The 2020 LASER summer school has been announced. It will take place June 1 to 6* , as always in Elba Island, this year with the theme DevOps, Microservices and Software Development for the Age of the Web. The first five speakers are listed on the conference page, with more to come, from both academia and industry.

This is the 16th edition of the school (already) and, as always, rests on the LASER recipe of “Sea, Sun and Software”: densely packed lectures by top experts with the opportunity to enjoy the extraordinary surroundings of the Island of Elba and the Hotel del Golfo’s unique food, beach and facilities, with lots of time devoted to interactions between speakers and attendees.

This year’s theme is devoted to advances in the newest Web technologies and the corresponding software engineering issues and development models.

*Arrival on May 31st, departure on June 7th.

There is a fateful ritual to keynote invitations. The first message reads (I am paraphrasing): “Respected peerless luminary of this millennium and the next, Will your excellency ever forgive me for the audacity of asking if you would deign to leave for a short interlude the blessed abodes that habitually beget your immortal insights, and (how could I summon the gall of even forming the thought!) consider the remote possibility of honoring our humble gathering with your august presence, condescending upon that historic occasion to partake of some minute fragment of your infinite wisdom with our undeserving attendees?”. The subsequent email, a few months later, is more like: “Hi Bertrand, looks like we don’t have your slides yet, the conference is coming up and the deadline was last week, did I miss anything?”. Next: “Hey you! Do you ever read your email? Don’t try the old line about your spam filter. Where are your slides? Our sponsors are threatening to withdraw funding. People are cancelling their registrations. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is tweeting about the conference. Send the damn stuff!” Last: “Scum, listen. We have athletic friends and they know where you live. The time for sending your PDF is NOW.”

Actually I don’t have my slides. I will have them all right for the talk. Maybe five minutes before, if you insist nicely. The talk will be bad or it will be less bad, but the slides are meant for the talk, they are not the talk. Even if I were not an inveterate procrastinator, rising at five on the day of the presentation to write them, I would still like to attend the talks before mine and refer to them. And why in the world would I let you circulate my slides in advance and steal my thunder?

This whole business of slides has become bizarre, a confusion of means and ends. Cicero did not use slides. Lincoln did not have PowerPoint. Their words still struck.

We have become hooked to slides. We pretend that they help the talk but that is a blatant lie except for the maybe 0.1% of speakers who use slides wisely. Slides are not for the benefit of the audience (are you joking? What slide user cares about the audience? Hahaha) but for the sole, exclusive and utterly selfish benefit of the speaker.

Good old notes (“cheat sheets”) would be more effective. Or writing down your speech and reading it from the lectern as historians still do (so we are told) at their conferences.

If we use slides at all, we should reserve them for illustration: to display a photograph, a graph, a table. The way politicians and police chiefs do when they bring a big chart to support their point a press conference.

I am like everyone else and still use slides as crutches. It’s so tempting. But don’t ask me to provide them in advance.

What about afterwards? It depends. Writing down the talk in the form of a paper is better. If you do not have the time, the text of the slides can serve as a simplified record. But only if the speaker wants to spread them that way. There is no rule  that slides should be published. If you see your slides as an ephemeral artifact to support an evanescent event (a speech at a conference) and wish them to remain only in the memory of those inspired enough to have attended it, that is your privilege.

Soliciting speaker slides: somewhat sane, slightly strange, or simply silly?

The full lineup of speakers at the 2018 LASER summer school on Software for Blockchains, Bitcoin and Distributed Trust is now ready, with the announcement of a new speaker, Primavera De Filippi from CNRS and Harvard on social and legal aspects.

The other speakers are Christian Cachin (IBM), Maurice Herlihy (Brown), Christoph Jentzsch (slock.it), me, Emil Gun Sirer (Cornell) and Roger Wattenhofer (ETH).

The school is the 14th in the LASER series and takes place June 2-10, 2018, on the island of Elba in Italy.

Early-fee registration deadline is February 10. The school’s page is here.

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 EdX, with the help of Marco Piccioni, a new MOOC entitled Agile Software Development. It starts airing today and is supported by exercises and quizzes. The course uses some of the material from my Agile book.

The course is running again! You can find it on EdX here.

Such online courses truly “run”: they are not just canned videos but include exercises and working material on which you can get feedback.

Like the book (“Agile: The Good, the Hype and the Ugly“, Springer), the course is a tutorial on agile methods, presenting an unbiased analysis of their benefits and limits.

(A version of this article also appeared on the CACM blog.)

Miracles happen!

Many months ago I accepted, perhaps too fast, a kind invitation to talk at the European Computer Science Summit, the annual conference of Informatics Europe, this week in Vienna. It came with a catch: I was not to choose my own topic but to talk on an imposed theme, ethics in relation to computer science.

As the summer advanced, I became increasingly worried about the talk. What was I going to say? For a nerd, an invited lecture on a free topic is easy: talk about how alias analysis makes automatic frame inference possible, explain the bizarre mixture of the best and worst in agile methods, present a simple method of concurrent programming, describe an environment enabling common mortals to prove programs correct, reflect on our 13-year experience of teaching programming and the supporting MOOCs, and so on. All straightforward stuff which one can present in one’s sleep. But ethics!

The summer receded, but the worry did not. What in the world would I talk about?

And then!

From the deepest of my heart: thank you, Volkswagen.

After my earlier ACM Webinar on Agile Methods! The Good, the Hype and the Ugly there were so many questions from the audience, left unanswered for lack of time, that a follow-up session has been set up. It will take place tomorrow (Friday, 27 March 2015) at noon New York time (18 Paris/Berlin/Zurich, 5 PM London etc.). Like the first one it is free and you can find the registration information here.

ACM is offering this coming Wednesday a one-hour webinar entitled Agile Methods: The Good, the Hype and the Ugly. It will air on February 18 at 1 PM New York time (10 AM West Coast, 18 London, 19 Paris, see here for more cities). The event is free and the registration link is here.

The presentation is based on my recent book with an almost identical title [1]. It will be a general discussion of agile methods, analyzing both their impressive contributions to software engineering and their excesses, some of them truly damaging. It is often hard to separate the beneficial from the indifferent and the plain harmful, because most of the existing presentations are of the hagiographical kind, gushing in admiration of the sacred word. A bit of critical distance does not hurt.

As you can see from the Amazon page, the first readers (apart from a few dissenters, not a surprise for such a charged topic) have relished this unprejudiced, no-nonsense approach to the presentation of agile methods.

Another characteristic of the standard agile literature is that it exaggerates the contrast with classic software engineering. This slightly adolescent attitude is not helpful; in reality, many of the best agile ideas are the direct continuation of the best classic ideas, even when they correct or adapt them, a normal phenomenon in technology evolution. In the book I tried to re-place agile ideas in this long-term context, and the same spirit will also guide the webinar. Ideological debates are of little interest to software practitioners; what they need to know is what works and what does not.

References

[1] Bertrand Meyer, Agile! The Good, the Hype and the Ugly, Springer, 2014, see Amazon page here, publisher’s page here and my own book page 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.

Here is a list of some presentations I am scheduled to give in the near future. Time for the faithful followers of this blog to start organizing groupie trips and get ready to haggle with the ticket scalpers and queue up at 3 AM for the best seats.

On May 9 I will give a talk in Paris, at Valtech, on the topic “Eiffel: Objects, Languages, Concurrency” [1]. It will be a general overview talk (in French) describing the key concepts of the Eiffel method and new developments.

On May 17 I will give a keynote at the Russian conference on IT education [2]. I haven’t sent a title and abstract yet but will talk about our experience of teaching introductory programming at ETH, now for 9 years, supported by the Touch of Class textbook which is now available in Russian. The talk itself will be in Russian.

On Tuesday, 29 May, I will give a keynote at TOOLS EUROPE in Prague [2]. This is the 50th TOOLS conference, a milestone, and I will talk on the theme of the conference, “The Triumph of Objects”, to assess the impact of object technology on the field of IT.

I am also giving a keynote at MSEPT (Multicore Software Engineering, Performance and Tools) the same week, on May 31. MSEPT [4] is co-located with TOOLS in Prague. The title of my presentation is “Concurrent Programming is Easy” and I will in particular present new developments in the SCOOP model and our first steps in the Concurrency Made Easy ERC Advanced Investigator Project. In addition I will be participating in two Eiffel-related workshops at TOOLS, WAVE on Advances in Verification for Eiffel, May 29 [5], where we are submitting several papers, and the third “Eiffel Web Design Feast” on May 30, part of a community project that is building an Eiffel-based Web development framework [6].

On June 5 I am giving an invited talk at the New Faculty Symposium of ICSE (International Conference on Software Engineering) in Zurich [7]. The title (assigned by the organizers) is “Promoting your ideas”. I did warn the organizers that this would be a contrarian talk as I find the current computer science publication culture in need of a reboot — this is the goal of the November Dagstuhl workshop mentioned below — but they said it was OK; I might even have heard the word “welcome” at some point.

On June 12 I will deliver a keynote at the International Conference on Reliable Software Technologies, also known as Ada-Europe, in Stockholm  [8]. The Ada community remains significant and is becoming interested in contracts, hence the subject of my talk: Life with Contracts. I will summarize the experience gained in applying Design by Contract as a core principle throughout development, and the next steps in developing the approach.

On June 24 I am  on one of the two panels at the Alan Turing Centenary Conference in Manchester [9]; the panel is entitled The Big Questions in Computation, Intelligence and Life.

In Seattle, 16-20 July, I look forward to presenting our latest verification ideas to the other members of the IFIP Working Group 2.3 on programming methodology [10]; this is the toughest and most unforgiving audience I know, but their feedback has always proved invaluable.

The next set of talks (apart from a possible presentation at the Snowbird conference in July, which I haven’t confirmed yet) is at our LASER summer school in Elba, September 2-8 [11], where I will deliver a set of lectures entitled Eiffel: a study in language design and evolution; it will be an in-depth discussion of issues that arise in devising a quality-focused programming language and managing its continued refinement over a long period, focusing on a few key design principles.

A few weeks later, on September 26, in Natal, I will present a keynote at the Brazilian software engineering conference, SBES [12]. I will talk about concurrency again, hoping of course to have new results to showcase by then.

Another event in which I am involved and expect to give a presentation is a Dagstuhl “Perspectives” workshop on the Publication Culture in Computer Science, November 6-9 [13]. The workshop was set up on the initiative of Moshe Vardi and I am one of the organizers. There is a widespread feeling that the publication model of computer science is broken; a number of articles in this blog have discussed the issues. At Dagstuhl we hope to be able to start fixing the process. Stay tuned.

References

[1] Talk at Valtech, 9 May 2012, information here.

[2] 10th All-Russian conference on IT education, Moscow, 16-18 May 2012, conference page here.

[3] TOOLS Europe 2012, Prague, 28 May – 1 June 2012, conference page here.

[4] MSEPT: International Conference on Multicore Software Engineering, Performance, and Tools, Prague, 31 May – June 1, 2012, conference page here.

[5] Workshop on Advances in Verification for Eiffel (WAVE), Prague, 29 May 2012, workshop page here.

[6] Eiffel Web Design Feast, Prague, 30 May 2012, call for participation available here.

[7] New Faculty Symposium at the International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE), Zurich, 5 June 2012, symposium page here.

[8] 17th International Conference on Reliable Software Technologies (Ada Europe 2012), Stockholm, 11-15 June 2012, conference page here.

[9] Alan Turing Centenary Conference, Manchester, 11-25 June 2012, conference page here.

[10] IFIP TC2-WG2.3 (Working group on Programming Methodology), group page here (meetings by invitation only).

[11] LASER summer school 2012, Innovative Languages for Software Engineering, 2-8 September 2012 (other speakers are Andrei Alexandrescu on D, Roberto Ierusalimschy on Lua, Ivar Jacobson on UML and SEMAT, Eric Meijer on C# and Linq, Martin Odersky on Scala, Simon Peyton-Jones on Haskell, and Guido van Rossum on Python; school page here.

[12] XXVI Brazilian Symposium on Software Engineering (SBES), part of CBSoft (3rd Brazilian Conference on Software: Theory and Practice), Natal, 23-28 September 2012, symposium page here.

[13] Perspectives Workshop: Publication Culture in Computing Research (by invitation), Dagstuhl, 6-9 November 2012, workshop page here.