Often,  “we do this and then we do that” is just a lazy way of stating “to do that, we must have achieved this.” The second form is more general than the first, since there may be many things you can “do” to achieve a certain condition. The extra generality is welcome for software requirements, […]

The post Logical beats sequential appeared first on Bertrand Meyer's technology+ blog.

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 […]

The post New paper: optimization of test cases generated from failed proofs appeared first on Bertrand Meyer's technology+ blog.

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 […]

The post New book: the Requirements Handbook appeared first on Bertrand Meyer's technology+ blog.

Short version: the full text of my Introduction to the Theory of Programming Languages book (second printing, 1991) is now available. This page has more details including the table of chapters, and a link to the PDF (3.3MB, 448 + xvi pages). The book is a survey of methods for language description, particularly semantics (operational, […]

The post Introduction to the Theory of Programming Languages: full book now freely available appeared first on Bertrand Meyer's technology+ blog.

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 […]

The post PhD and postdoc positions in verification in Switzerland appeared first on Bertrand Meyer's technology+ blog.

There is a new paper out, several years in the making: The Role of Formalism in System Requirements Jean-Michel Bruel, Sophie Ebersold, Florian Galinier, Manuel Mazzara, Alexander Naumchev, Bertrand Meyer Computing Surveys (ACM), vol. 54, no. 5, June 2021, pages 1-36 DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3448975 Preprint available here. The authors are from the Schaffhausen Institute of Technology […]

The post Publication announcement: survey on requirements techniques, formal and non-formal appeared first on Bertrand Meyer's technology+ blog.

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 […]

The post Tomorrow (Thursday) noon EDT: ACM talk on requirements appeared first on Bertrand Meyer's technology+ blog.

Science progresses through people taking advantage of others’ insights and inventions. One of the conditions that makes the game possible is that you acknowledge what you take. For the originator, it is rewarding to see one’s ideas reused, but frustrating when that happens without acknowledgment, especially when you are yourself punctilious about citing your own […]

The post Some contributions appeared first on Bertrand Meyer's technology+ blog.

As part of our monthly beta version program, we are pleased to make EiffelStudio 19.06 available.