Declarative Systems & Software Engineering Newsletter

Issue 26 - 5th June 1995

Editor - Stuart Maclean

Contents:

Editorial
Today's Seminar

Editorial

This week we have a trip report from Rachel Harrison and a note from Stewart Brodie relating to C++ books. Unfortunately, there is no DSSE seminar on Monday 5th June.

Trip Report - Rachel Harrison

Which Technique ? - Meeting Report

I spent 24th May at the 45th meeting of the Software Reliability and Metrics Club, which was held in Bristol. The meeting was entitled "Which Technique", and I was invited to talk about our experiences of evaluating functional and object-oriented languages. In the morning, Barbara Kitchenham gave a tutorial on the DESMET work done by NCC (in collaboration with the DTI, BNR, GEC and others). This covered their findings concerning setting up quantitative case studies, formal experiments, and surveys; the pitfalls and the lessons learnt. In the afternoon, we discussed a number of case studies, including our work. Jeremy Dick, of B-Core UK Ltd, talked about measuring process improvement due to formal methods (and had to deal with a fair amount of criticism from Tom Anderson). Tom Brookes, of BA, then talked about a comparison they've done between conventional and formal designs for secure software components. I've got a copy of Barbara's notes and contact addresses etc if anyone's interested.

C++ books

Stewart Brodie has received a brochure from McGraw-Hill relating to a range of books on 'C, C++ and Object-Oriented Technology'. A selection is included here. See Stewart (snb94r) for more details.

Today's Seminar

There is no DSSE seminar this week.

Copy deadline: 5pm Friday for Monday's newsletter, but send the articles any time.

Hugh Glaser
Declarative Systems & Software Engineering Group
Department of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton