DAVID LORGE PARNAS
Director of the Software Quality Research Laboratory,
University of Limerick
Precise Practical Software Documentation:
A Real Software Engineering Grand Challenge
ABSTRACT: For many years it has been fashionable to propose rather grandiose applications as “grand challenges” for Computer Science. This talk discusses a more “down-to-earth” problem, one that must be solved before we will be able to make real progress in the area of Software Development.
I argue that to produce software that we can trust, we must be able to provide precise documentation that can be used as a trustworthy source of necessary information about the structure of the system and the behavior of each of its components. We discuss why such documentation is needed, how it can be produced, and what will be required to turn theory into practice.
BIO: Dr. David Lorge Parnas is the Professor of Software Engineering, SFI Fellow and Director of the Software Quality Research Laboratory at the University of Limerick, Professor Emeritus at McMaster University in Hamilton Ontario and Adjunct Professor at Carleton University in Ottawa. Dr. David Parnas received his B.S., M.S. and Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering Systems and Communications Sciences from Carnegie Mellon University, and honorary doctorates from the ETH in Zurich and the Catholic University of Louvain. Dr. Parnas was the first of the Nobert Wiener Prize form Computing Professionals for Social Responsibility. He has also received the FifF prize from Forum Informatiker fur Frieden und Verantwortung in Germany and was proud to share the IEEE Computer Society’s sixtieth anniversary award with Professor Maurice Wilkes of Cambridge University.
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