Bertrand Meyer's technology+ blog

Towards a Calculus of Object Programs

17 April 201413 July 2011 by Bertrand Meyer

I posted here a draft of a new article, Towards a Calculus of Object Programs. Here is the abstract: Verifying properties of object-oriented software requires a method for handling references in a simple and intuitive way, closely related to how O-O programmers reason about their programs. The method presented here, a Calculus of Object Programs, … Read more

Testing insights

17 April 201411 July 2011 by Bertrand Meyer

A recent paper by Arcuri and Briand takes aim at Adaptive Random Testing and, in the process, at some of our work. Is the criticism justified? And what of their own reliance on fault injection?

If I’m not pure, at least my functions are

14 February 20184 July 2011 by Bertrand Meyer

It is often suggested that the programming language should support specifying that a routine is pure; many people have indeed proposed the addition of a keyword such as pure to Eiffel. One of the reasons this is not — in my opinion — such a great idea is that purity is just a special case of the more general problem of framing: specifying and verifying what a routine does not change. If we can specify an arbitrary frame property, then we can, as a special case covered by the general mechanism, specify that a routine changes nothing. The language solution is simple: no routine may change the value of a query other than those specified in its postcondition

Agile methods: the good, the bad and the ugly

17 April 201427 June 2011 by Bertrand Meyer

Agile methods are wonderful. They’ll give you software in no time at all, turn your customers and users into friends, catch bugs before they catch you, change the world, and boost your love life.

Concurrent programming is easy

17 April 201420 June 2011 by Bertrand Meyer

Concurrent programming raises very hard problems. But the difficulty should be for the implementers of a concurrency model, not the application programmers. This article discusses concurrency challenges and presents the new SCOOP implementation which targets them.

Incremental research again

17 April 201420 June 2011 by Bertrand Meyer

After some updating, I republished in the Communications of the ACM blog my discussion of the value of incremental research, which first appeared as an article here .

Assessing concurrency models

17 April 201412 June 2011 by Bertrand Meyer

In a recent experiment with students we wanted to know how the SCOOP concurrency model compares to Java Threads in terms of ease of learning, program readability and correctness. Our group, however, is heavily involved with SCOOP. How did we address the risk of bias, and other parts of the “Professor Smith Syndrome”? What are our results, and can you believe them?

The Professor Smith syndrome: Part 2

17 April 20146 June 2011 by Bertrand Meyer

How can we perform meaningful empirical software engineering studies in a university, using students? This post describes four major mistakes, some affecting the credibility of such a study, and one an ethical flaw.

The Professor Smith syndrome: Part 1 – a quiz

17 April 20142 June 2011 by Bertrand Meyer

[As a reminder, this blog is now on a regular schedule, appearing every Monday. Sometimes in mid-week there will be a lighter piece or, as here, a preparation for the following Monday’s entry.] Consider the following hypothetical report in experimental software engineering (see earlier posts: [1], [2]): Professor Smith has developed a new programming technique, … Read more

Stendhal on abstraction

17 April 201429 May 2011 by Bertrand Meyer

From an unlikely source, a lucid description of data abstraction and the principles of object technology.