Software engineering, programming methodology, languages, verification, general technology, publication culture, and more
This is a slightly reworked version of an article in the CACM blog, which also served as the introduction to a panel which I moderated at ESEC/FSE 2013 last week; the panelists were Harald Gall, Mark Harman, Giancarlo Succi (position paper only) and Tony Wasserman. For all the books on software engineering, and the articles, … Read more
Our Concurrency Made Easy project, the result of an ERC Advanced Investigator Grant, is trying to solve the problem of making concurrent programming simple, reliable and effective. It has spurred related efforts, in particular the Roboscoop project applying concurrency to robotics software. Sebastian Nanz and other members of the CME project at ETH have just … Read more
A new version of my Touch of Class [1] programming textbook is available. It is not quite a new edition but more than just a new printing. All the typos that had been reported as of a few months ago have been corrected. The format is also significantly smaller. This change is more than a … Read more
I have always admired Daniel Barenboim, both as a pianist and as a conductor — and not just because years ago, from pictures on disk covers, we looked strikingly alike, see e.g. [1] which could almost be me at that time (Then I went to see him in concert and realized that he was … Read more
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 … Read more
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 … Read more
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.
(Please note the general disclaimer [1].) How Misclassification Impacts Bug Prediction [2], an article to be presented on Thursday at ICSE, is the archetype of today’s successful empirical software engineering research, deriving significant results from the mining of publicly available software project repositories — in this case Tomcat5 and three others from Apache, as well … Read more
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 … Read more