New preprint: Loop unrolling — formal definition and application to testing






Li Huang, Bertrand Meyer and Reto Weber, New preprint: Loop unrolling:  formal definition and application to testing, February 2025, submitted to publication. Available here on arXiv and also here. Abstract Testing coverage criteria usually make a gross simplification: they assume that loops will have their bodies executed 0 or 1 time. How much (specificall,y how … Read more




New preprint: a standard framework for research on bugs and automatic program repair






Preprint of new article: Victoria Kananchuk, Ilgiz Mustafin and Bertrand Meyer, Bugfix: a standard language, database schema and repository for research on bugs and automatic program repair, submitted for publication, February 2025. Available on arXiv here. Also available here. What this is in a nutshell (there is a longer abstract below): a proposal for, and … Read more




New paper: seeding contradiction






Just published: Li Huang, Bertrand Meyer and Manuel Oriol, Seeding Contradiction: a fast method for generating full-coverage test suites, in Springer Nature Computer Science, vol. 6, no. 4, 2025. The text is available here on the publisher’s site. Also available is a preprint version. This just published SNCS article and revised and extended from a … Read more




The French School of Programming






July 14 (still here for 15 minutes) is not a bad opportunity to announced the publication of a new book: The French School of Programming. The book is a collection of chapters, thirteen of them, by rock stars of programming and software engineering research (plus me), preceded by a Foreword by Jim Woodcock and a … Read more




New paper: optimization of test cases generated from failed proofs






Li Huang (PhD student at SIT) will be presenting at an ISSRE workshop the paper Improving Counterexample Quality from Failed Program Verification, written with Manuel Oriol and me. One can find the text on arXiv here. (I will update this reference with the official publication link when I have it.) The result being presented is … Read more




New book: the Requirements Handbook






I am happy to announce the publication of the Handbook of Requirements and Business Analysis (Springer, 2022). It is the result of many years of thinking about requirements and how to do them right, taking advantage of modern principles of software engineering. While programming, languages, design techniques, process models and other software engineering disciplines have … Read more




PhD and postdoc positions in verification in Switzerland






The Chair of Software Engineering, my group at the Schaffhausen Institute of Technology in Switzerland (SIT), has open positions for both PhD students and postdocs. We are looking for candidates with a passion for reliable software and a mix of theoretical knowledge and practical experience in software engineering. Candidates should have degrees in computer science … Read more




Time to resurrect PSP?






Let us assume for the sake of the argument that software quality matters. There are many ingredients to software quality, of which one must be the care that every programmer devotes to the job. The Personal Software Process, developed by Watts Humphrey in the 1990s [1], prescribes a discipline that software developers should apply to … Read more




Getting a program right, in nine episodes






About this article: it originated as a series of posts on the Communications of the ACM blog. I normally repost such articles here. (Even though copy-paste is usually not good, there are three reasons for this duplication: the readership seems to be largely disjoint; I can use better formatting, since their blog software is more … Read more