APPropriate Behaviour
The book about all the things software writers do that aren't writing software.
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Author Archives: Graham
The ABC of Software Engineering Research
About this paper The ABC of Software Engineering Research by Klaas-Jan Stol and Brian Fitzgerald, published October 2018. See link for full citation. Notes There are too many ways in which terms describing research methods in software engineering get used, … Continue reading
Java By Contract: a Worked Example
Java by Contract is an implementation of Design by Contract, as promoted by Bertrand Meyer and the Eiffel Software company, for the Java programming language. The contract is specified using standard Java methods and annotations, making it a more reliable … Continue reading
Posted in Java
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Updates to JavaByContract
Some improvements to JavaByContract, the design-by-contract tool for Java: Preconditions, Postconditions and Invariants now appear in the Javadoc for types that use JavaByContract. While this is only a small source change, it’s a huge usability improvement, as programmers using your … Continue reading
Posted in Java
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Impossibility and Uncertainty in AI
About this paper Impossibility and Uncertainty Theorems in AI Value Alignment (or why your AGI should not have a utility function), Peter Eckersley. Submitted to the ArXiV on December 31, 2018. Notes Ethical considerations in artificial intelligence applications have arguably … Continue reading
Posted in academia, AI
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The App that Wasn’t (Yet)
One of the early goals written into the mission statement of the Labrary was an eponymous app for organising research notes. I’ve used Mekentosj Springer Readcube Papers for years, and encountered Mendeley and others, and found that they were all … Continue reading
Posted in architecture of sorts, design
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Research Watch, and Java by Contract
I introduced Java by Contract, a tool for building design-by-contract style invariants, preconditions and postconditions in Java using annotations. It’s MIT licensed, contributions are welcome, and I hope this helps lots of people to introduce stronger correctness checking into your … Continue reading
Posted in academia, Java, OOP
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Teaching Quality Object-Oriented Programming
About this paper Teaching Quality OOP by Yishai A. Feldman, published March 2005 (see the link for full citation). Notes One of the points made in my book Object-Oriented Programming the Easy Way is that objects should be specified by … Continue reading
Posted in academia
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Cleaner Code
Readers of OOP the easy way will be familiar with the distinction between object-oriented programming and procedural programming. You will have read, in that book, about how what we claim is OOP in the sentence “OOP has failed” is actually … Continue reading
Product teams: our products are not our products
Woah, too many products. Let me explain. No, it will take too long, let me summarise. Sometimes, people running software organisations call their teams “product teams”, and organise them around particular “products”. I do not believe that this is a … Continue reading
Posted in architecture of sorts, Business
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Mapping software engineering tools
Despite the theory that everything can be done in software (and of course, anything that can’t be done could in principle be approximated using numerical methods, or fudged using machine learning), software engineering itself, the business of writing software, seems … Continue reading
Posted in architecture of sorts, tool-support
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