TOOLS USA '99 - towards quality software, the way ahead
TOOLS USA '99 Keynotes
TOOLS USA '99 will welcome the following invited speakers for keynote presentations:
- David L. Parnas, McMaster University, Canada
- Bertrand Meyer, ISE, USA
- Don Box, DevelopMentor, USA
- Tucker Taft, AverStar, USA
Tools for Component Documentation, Analysis and Testing
The best software components will be hard to use unless they
are accompanied by precise accurate documentation. The talk describes some
powerful notation for writing such documentation and tools that can
be used to produce such documentation and check that it accurately
describes the software.
About David Parnas David Lorge Parnas is the 1999 recipient of the tools-conferences.component and Object Technology Award.
David L. Parnas, McMaster University, Canada
David Lorge Parnas is the NSERC/Bell Industrial Research Chair in Software
Engineering in the McMaster University Faculty of Engineering's Computing and
Software Department where he is Director of the Software Engineering Programme.
He is also an associate member of the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
He has been Professor at the University of Victoria, the Technische Hochschule Darmstadt,
the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Carnegie Mellon University and the
University of Maryland. He has also held non-academic positions advising Philips Computer Industry (Apeldoorn), the United States Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, D.C., the IBM Federal Systems Division, and the Atomic Energy Control Board of Canada.
The Unity of Software and the Power of Roundtrip Engineering
Bertrand Meyer, Interactive Software Engineering, USA
Part of the initial progress in developing an engineering basis for software development was to identify the specific tasks at hand and highlight their differences. Although that step was probably inevitable, it has led to a somewhat skewed view of software engineering, which ignores the fundamental unity of software construction, and leads to unnecessary gaps, detrimental to quality and productivity. It is more fruitful to take advantage of the fundamental invariants of software development and view system engineering as a continuous, seamless and reversible process. The talk will show how that full roundtrip engineering is possible in practice, leading to far higher quality of both process and product.
About Bertrand Meyer
Bertrand Meyer is president of Interactive Software Engineering and a pioneer of object technology through his books, in particular
"Object-Oriented Software Construction" (whose second edition published by Prentice Hall received the Software Development Jolt
Product Excellence Award 1997), "Reusable Software" and "Object Success". Active in both the business and academic scenes he has directed the
development of widely used O-O tools and libraries totaling hundreds of thousands of lines, and taught O-O principles and modern software
engineering worldwide. He is editor of the Object Technology column of IEEE Computer, the Eiffel column in the JOOP, the Prentice Hall O-O Series,
and the Addison-Wesley Eiffel in Practice Series.
Life After the Object Wars
Don Box, DevelopMentor, USA
The object technology field has been fraught with format wars that have stifled wide spread adoption of any one particular technology. While language wars have existed since the beginning of time, the attention of most of the software industry has shifted from language debates to the component and distributed object battlefields. While it is difficult to predict which (if any) technology will dominate component software or distributed computing, a fair amount of common ground can be found if one is willing to "put down the sword" and view how each of the various camps solves the problems at hand. In that spirit, this talk will present a unified view of component software based on the common ideas shared by the dominant component technologies, identifying the best (and worst) aspects of the current state-of-the-practice in component development.
About Don Box
Don Box is a cofounder of DevelopMentor, a component software think tank
that educates most of the industry on COM-related technologies. Don is the
author of "Essential COM" and a coauthor of "Effective COM," both from
Addison Wesley. Don is a contributing editor at Microsoft Systems Journal,
where he writes the bimonthly "House of COM" column.
Programming Language Design and Software Quality
Tucker Taft, AverStar, USA
When designing a programming language, one essential fact must be remembered: programmers are humans, with the human penchant for making mistakes. Are there ways that the design of a programming language can help overcome our human weaknesses, by allowing the implementation to catch, at compile-time, many of the kinds of mistakes we make, or failing that, at run-time? This talk will discuss some of the techniques that can be used during language design to make typical mistakes easier to detect, and thereby help programmers achieve a higher level of quality at an earlier stage in the life-cycle of an application. The talk will include examples from various recent programming language designs, including C++, Eiffel, Ada 95, and Java.
About Tucker Taft
S. Tucker Taft is Technical Director of the AverStar, Inc.
(formerly Intermetrics, Inc.) Distributed Information Technology
Solutions (DITS) division. He is also chief architect for AverStar's
Ada 95 technology, called "AdaMagic"™.
Mr. Taft graduated from Harvard College in 1975 with a bachelor's in Chemistry, Summa Cum Laude, and then worked four years for Harvard in the student computer center, managing the first Unix system that was installed outside of AT&T. Thereafter he worked one year as a private consultant, and then in 1980 joined Intermetrics. While at Intermetrics, he participated in the development of the Ada Integrated Environment for the Air Force, a commercial C cross-compiler, the Common APSE Interface Set (CAIS), and an Ada binding to SQL (SAME). From 1990 to 1995, Mr. Taft led the Ada 9X language design team, culminating in the February 1995 approval of Ada 95 as the first ISO standardized object-oriented programming language. More recently, Mr. Taft led the development of Intermetrics/Averstar's Ada 95 to Java byte-code compiler, called "AppletMagic"™.
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