What software engineering can learn from soccer

We've talked about software quality for a long time, developing numerous software quality assurance approaches in the hope of making our software increasingly better. Charles Mann, contributing editor of MIT's Technology Review, points out that other technologies-televisions, cars, airplanes, bridges-have improved over time as their engineering matured; he asks why software has not. In the February 2001 issue of Communications of the ACM, Edsger Dijkstra said that software's biggest challenge is "how not to make a mess of it." So, where have we gone wrong? To answer this question, we can look at how other disciplines learn and grow. Software development is as much an art as a science, and we learn lessons from both perspectives. Many of us think of ourselves as engineers: we train in engineering departments and rely on engineering tools, techniques, and quantitative methods to guide us. But our work's artistic side-which those who promote agile methods often emphasize-plays an important role, too. As good software developers, we are grounded in artistic engineering activities such as modeling and design. Our good people skills enable us to work with customers and on teams. And we need good instincts to select the best approaches and products to use.     

Editorial

At the time of writing this editorial, subscribers will have just received their copies of the triple issue honouring the work of Rod Burstall. Coordinating this collection was a substantial undertaking; and thanks go to all concerned, particularly to David Rydeheard and Don Sannella and the behind the scenes production staff. We (the journal editors) hope you agree that it was well worth waiting for the fascinating collection. The production and scheduling of that set of papers, and other incidental but cumulative factors, have contributed to recent issues being late. We hope soon to be back close to our planned, evenly timed, publication timetable; however it also seems timely to mention, and to reiterate, some changes which are afoot. As of this issue (14.1) we shall revert to our initial publication frequency of 4 issues per year, but these will be larger than in earlier volumes and will retain the large page format adopted in Volume 12. [A reminder for authors who use LaTeX to use the new class files.] We are now receiving, and publishing, long papers (but still with the option of including supplementary material on the web) and, except in special issues, strive to achieve a reasonable coverage of topics within the given constraints. Although normally skipped over, readers of the journal front matter might notice periodic changes to the editorial board. These usually go unmentioned; our editors (who are working editors, not merely ‘names’) seek no reward or praise. Readers will also notice the recently modernised BCS-FACS logo and a declaration that the journal (although truly international in scope) was founded by (BCS-)FACS, some even to this day refer to it as ‘the FACS journal’, and we are very happy for this to continue. Bringing these two threads together gets me to the point of this digression. Dan Simpson founded the BCS specialist group on Formal Aspects of Computing Science some 25 years ago. Without his radical suggestion that the BCS had a specialist group that actually addressed Computer Science, there would have been no FACS and no FACS journal. Dan has recently finished his spell as Dean in the Faculty of IT at Brighton University and he has also resigned as a member of our editorial board. As you can see, he was active to the very end being responsible for progressing 2 of the 3 papers in this issue. I gather he now intends to concern himself with other matters; I would counsel a less stressful life and more Bob Dylan music. He has been a friend and colleague of many of those associated with the FACS group and its journal; on their behalf may I offer a big ‘thank you’ for all that you have done for us and offer our best wishes for whatever endeavours you are about to embark upon. Very many years ago, at a conference, I heard someone respond in debate “I didn't see who said that but it sounded like Mr Simpson from Teesside … .” – well it's no longer ‘Mr’ nor ‘Teesside’ but I can't believe that we really have seen or heard the last of this Yorkshire lad. Thanks, goodbye and good luck. It is with deep regret that we have to report the death of Ole-Johan Dahl. Professor Dahl was a leader of thought in many fields; his contributions on Object-Oriented languages and methods were recently recognised in his (joint) awards of the IEEE von Neumann prize and the ACM Turing Award. He was also a major contributor to Formal Methods and a future edition of this journal will attempt to mark his contribution. We have lost an editor; our thoughts are with his family who have lost so much more.au     

Human Factors in the 1990s: sealing transition cracks

This is an account of my 8-year tour as Human Factors editor during the last decade of the past century. I accepted this appointment with the understanding that the journal, although highly successful, was entering a period of transition during which problems were surfacing that would require some strategic redirection. Together with Human Factors and Ergonomics Society staff and my editorial board, which in addition to peer review I relied on heavily for advice on journal policy, we effected a number of changes. In this article, I review those changes along with the issues they were designed to address and the reasoning behind each. It remains for the reader to judge whether the net effect of these changes has been for the better.     

Introduction

Concluding remarks With this brief exposition of the areas covered in this special double issue on Eurotra, we shall now conclude our introduction. We hope that the volume will achieve its goals, as outlined above, at least to some extent. Certainly, much more could be said about a wide range of topics which have been covered in the lifetime or the project so far. For instance, these article, mainly written by linguists, deliberately neglect the software implementation and environment aspects of the prototype Eurotra Translation System, as well as a number of peripheral tools and components of the system that are available to the user, such as lexical data bases, text-handling mechanisms and the like. The reader interested in aspects of this kind is referred to Raw et al. 1989 for a very brief introduction, and to the Eurotra software team at the Commission of the European Communities (DG XIII, Luxembourg) for more details. However, one goal that we do hope to come close to achieving is to give a fair overview of the Eurotra linguistic theory of translation and the mainstream and sideline formalisms expressing variant versions of it. If we have come anywhere near achieving that, our gratitude is due to the numerous Eurotra colleagues who have supported us in preparing this volume, and to the editor of this journal.     

Statistical Analysis on the Articles and Authors of

“Journal of Image and Graphics” started its publication four years ago. Since then, it has made many contributions to the progress of the researches, applications and developments of image and graphics in China. In this paper, according to the principles and methods of bibliometrics, a systematic investigation and analysis has been made on the articles published in this journal and the authors of these articles in the last four years. This work reveals the current status of researchers on image and graphics, and shows the development of “Journal of Image and Graphics” after its initiation. It not only affirms the rationality of this journal as a core journal in the science of image and graphics, but also provides useful reference data for the further development of the science and advancement of the journal.     

Personal reflections from the fifth editor of Human Factors

The fifth editor of Human Factors provides reflections on journal publication spanning four volumes printed from 1976 to 1980. During that period, most of the publication and management activities were handled by volunteer efforts of the editor, the editorial board, and the editor's organization. Electronic word processing was not readily available, and most publication tasks required laborious clerical support, resulting in long publication lags. The editor provides reflection on the steps taken by the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society to separate editorial and production activities during that period to provide more support for the journal editorial duties. This resulted in the Society becoming its own publisher, building the beginning of a publication staff in the central office, and increasing the published page count. Rigorous editorial reviews were used to improve the scientific quality of the journal. The publication emphasis was on empirical research, but theoretical articles and research reviews were also considered for publication. Regular journal articles, short research notes, and special topics were published as ways to broaden the scientific coverage and shorten the publication lag.     

Reflections on information systems practice, education and research: 10 years of the Information Systems Journal

This paper celebrates the 10‐year anniversary of the Information Systems Journal (ISJ) and the Editors reflect on the papers that have been published over that period and the changes that have occurred in the discipline of information systems. In the opening paper of ISJ, we suggested that the ‘launch of a new journal in information systems prompts thought and debate concerning the state of the subject area and some contemplation of its past and future’. We discussed three areas of this ‘not‐yet‐established discipline’: practice, education and research. In this follow‐up paper, we forgo our convention of ISJ editors not publishing in the Journal. We examine the issues raised in the first paper and consider what has happened in the intervening years as charted in the ISJ. The overview is necessarily selective, probably Anglocentric (with, perhaps, a slight Francophile tinge), sometimes downright opinionated, as well as over‐estimating, perhaps, the contribution of one particular IS journal.     

网站版面设计步骤与技巧

随着社会、科技的发展,网络越来越走近我们的生活。而网站则越来越成为我们了解世界、学习知识的平台。浏览网页,首先映入我们眼帘的是它的版面设计。一个好的版面设计可以使我们浏览轻松,身心愉悦,没有疲惫感。这就对我们现在网站版面审计人员提出了新的要求。版面设计也可以理解为布局设计,就是我们在浏览器上说看的一个完整的页面。设计师们如何将所有要体现的内容有机的整合和分布,达到某种视觉效果,这就叫做版面布局。在长期的工作实践中,我自己总结了一点心得,与大家交流一下。     

The secret operations of the mind

David Hume is widely believed to be one of the founders of functionalism. His principles of association are seen as an early attempt to articulate a mechanics of the mind akin to Newtonian mechanics. It is argued that this view is based on a failure to appreciate that Hume's skepticism about reason extends to our ability to understand the representation of everyday knowledge. For Hume there are secret operations of the mind, operations for which functional explanations are not forthcoming. Hume's place in the history of cognitive science is reevaluated in light of his views on common sense knowledge and belief formation.For my part, my only hope is, that I may contribute a little to the advancement of knowledge, by giving in some particulars a different turn to the speculations of philosophers, and pointing out to them more distinctly those subjects, where alone they can expect assurance and conviction.David Hume,A Treatise of Human Nature An earlier draft of this paper was delivered at a session of theFourth Computers and Philosophy Conference. I'd like to thank Herbert Simon for helpful comments at that session. Penetrating comments from an anonymous referee forMinds and Machines on an earlier version of this paper prompted what I hope are significant improvements, though I, of course, am responsible for any remaining defects.     

雕塑与自然

当下流行的后现代主义是对现代主义的一种批判思潮。它反对现代主义的工具理性,提出科学技术是把"双刃剑";它反对人类中心主义,提出人是世界的一部分,主张重建人与自然、人与人之间的自然和谐关系;它反对权威中心,倡导多元,强调不确定性和差异性。这些都体现出后现代艺术在机械统驭状态下对自然和谐的一种回归。在如此时代背景下,后现代主义的艺术,具体至雕塑艺术,试问其最佳状态如何?"自然"无疑是较佳答案。     

Optimal robust classifiers

Qualitatively, a filter is said to be “robust” if its performance degradation is acceptable for distributions close to the one for which it is optimal, that is, the one for which it has been designed. This paper adapts the signal-processing theory of optimal robust filters to classifiers. The distribution (class conditional distributions) to which the classifier is to be applied is parameterized by a state vector and the principle issue is to choose a design state that is optimal in comparison to all other states relative to some measure of robustness. A minimax robust classifier is one whose worst performance over all states is better than the worst performances of the other classifiers (defined at the other states). A Bayesian robust classifier is one whose expected performance is better than the expected performances of the other classifiers. The state corresponding to the Bayesian robust classifier is called the maximally robust state. Minimax robust classifiers tend to give too much weight to states for which classification is very difficult and therefore our effort is focused on Bayesian robust classifiers. Whereas the signal-processing theory of robust filtering concentrates on design with full distributional knowledge and a fixed number of observation variables (features), design via training from sample data and feature selection are so important for classification that robustness optimality must be considered from these perspectives—in particular, for small samples. In this context, for a given sample size, we will be concerned with the maximally robust state-feature pair. All definitions are independent of the classification rule; however, applications are only considered for linear and quadratic discriminant analysis, for which there are parametric forms for the optimal discriminants.     

Editorial of Message of the Spring

Starting from this issue, we will publish one or more feature articles in the first issue of IJSI each year. This paper or these papers will serve the purpose similar to feature articles of some contemporary journals. They will probably not focus on reporting research results of the author(s), but will focus on commenting last year''s progress of some selected research domain or subject and looking into the future development of this domain or subject in the coming year. These papers will form a special column which will get the common title "message of the spring". We announce our plan of publishing "message of the spring" also with the purpose of inviting live contributions to this special column. The first message of the spring published in this issue is the paper "Understanding Cognition through Synthesis and Analysis" of Christian Freksa. I hope all of our readers will like it and benefit a lot from it.     

A Multimedia, Multilingual Teaching and Training System for Children with Speech Disorders

The development of an audiovisual pronunciation teaching and training method and software system is discussed in this article. The method is designed to help children with speech and hearing disorders gain better control over their speech production. The teaching method is drawn up for progression from individual sound preparation to practice of sounds in sentences for four languages: English, Swedish, Slovenian, and Hungarian. The system is a general language-independent measuring tool and database editor. This database editor makes it possible to construct modules for all participant languages and for different sound groups. Two modules are under development for the system in all languages: one for teaching and training vowels to hearing-impaired children and the other for correction of misarticulated fricative sounds. In the article we present the measuring methods, the used distance score calculations of the visualized speech spectra, and problems in the evaluation of the new multimedia tool.     

对《中国图象图形学报》创刊10年来文章和作者的统计分析

《中国图象图形学报》创刊于1996年,10年来已对中国图像图形科学技术的研究、应用和发展起到了重要的促进作用.该文根据文献计量学的原理和方法对《中国图象图形学报》创刊10年以来所发表的文章和文章的作者情况进行了系统的统计和分析.这项工作的结果不仅反映了《中国图象图形学报》创刊以来的发展情况,并揭示了我国图像图形科学研究者的现状.该文既肯定了该刊作为图像图形学科核心期刊的合理性,又为该学科的发展和办好该刊物提供了参考数据.     

Das Fach Wirtschaftsinformatik im Spiegel seiner Zeitschrift

In 1959, the journal “elektronische datenverarbeitung” (electronic data processing) was founded. Later it was renamed as “Angewandte Informatik” (applied computer science). Due to the diversification of computer science and the emergence of the discipline “business and information systems engineering” (BISE) the journal was focused on this discipline. Accordingly, the name was changed to WIRTSCHAFTSINFORMATIK (the German word for BISE). Fifty volumes of the journal reflect major developments and varying topics of the discipline. By installing a broad editorial board comprised of researchers and practitioners as well as by cooperation with the major scientific associations the journal became the central publication in the field. The paper gives a survey of organization, design, thematic focuses, and important subjects. Thus, by browsing through the contents of the journal the development of the scientific discipline Wirtschaftsinformatik is illustrated.     

I have seen the future: it is flooded with email

I have been using electronic mail for years, first via Bitnet, then via the Internet. What do you do when you get email from someone you know? Delete it? No, of course not. You read it and you answer it. Therein lies my problem. Everyone is answering me! A few months ago, when I logged on, I had five or six messages each day. Now I log on to find 10 or 20 messages, all of them requiring a response. I suppose I could delete them, but friends are hard to find, so I find myself reading and responding to more and more messages-often on subjects I don't really care about. Everyone, it seems, feels it is better to send than to receive. Did Alvin Toffler warn us about this? I have had a vision of the future. In it, we live in a virtual-reality environment and we spend all our waking hours as employees of the US Electronic Postal Service. Wake me when it's over     

The end of science revisited

Because science has advanced so rapidly over the past century or so, we assume that it can and will continue to do so, possibly forever. But science itself tells us that there are limits to our knowledge. The book "End of Science" argued that science - especially pure science, the grand request to understand the universe and our place in it - might be entering an era of diminishing returns. We would like to see a greater recognition of science's limitations, particularly in mind-related fields, where our desire for self-knowledge can make us susceptible to pseudo scientific cults such as Marxism, social Darwinism, eugenics, and psychoanalysis. Science is never more dangerous than when it seeks to tell us what we are, what we can be, and even what we should be.     

A SIMULATION EXERCISE

The following article appeared in the January 1977, Vol. 8, No. 2 issue of Simuletter, the journal of the Special Interest Group on Simulation, a group of members from the Association for Computing Machinery. Dr. Harold J. Highland is the editor of Simuletter and his address is: Chairman, Data Processing Department, State Technical College, Farmingdaler NY 11735. We have reason to believe that some of our readers might be able to “fill in the blanks” in the article; and though we cannot offer any prize, certainly not on the order of that given by Dr. Highland we shall be glad to publish any solutions (accompanied by “proof”) in our April 1978 issue. We shall certainly keep our readers posted as to the results obtained by Simuletter solvers. Why not send your work to both and double the pleasure as it were!     

The construction of self-synchronizing finite state protocols

A technique is presented for constructing a finite state protocol from an originally given finite state specification of one process. We present three constructions, showing that they each provide send-receive symmetric solutions which are selfsynchronizing. Two lemmas are proved that provide insight into the types of interactions that arise in these types of finite state protocols. In essence we show that interactions occur between the processes only through isomorphic transitions and that during any interaction between the processes at most one of the two FIFO queues of messages is nonempty.Raymond E. Miller has been Director and Professor of the School of Information and Computer Science at the Georgia Institute of Technology since 1980. Prior to that he was employed by IBM for over thirty years, most of this time as a Research Staff Member at the IBM Research Center in Yorktown Heights, N.Y., where he held a number of technical management positions. He received a B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and a B.S. in Electrical Engineering, M.S. in Mathematics, and PhD in Electrical Engineering, all from the University of Illinois, Urbana. His research areas of interest include theory of computation, machine organization, parallel computation, and communication protocols. He has written over sixty papers, authored a two volume book on switching theory, served as editor for a book on computer complexity, and is editor of a book series of foundations of computer science. He is a Fellow of the IEEE, a member of ACM and AAAS and has been active in numerous ACM capacities including being a member of the ACM Council for six years, an ACM National Lecturer for 1982–83, and a member of the AFIPS Board of Directors for four years. He is a member of the Computer Science Board, and was a member of the NSF Advisory Committee for Computer Research from 1982 to 1985, serving as Chairman for 1983–84. He has taught in a visiting or part time capacity at numerous institutions including Cal Tech, New York University, Yale, University of California at Berkeley and the Polytechnic Institute of New York.This work was partially supported through a contract with GTE Laboratories