Tag: software
-
Software defect costs
In my persuit of software engineering data, I’ve recently been poring over a 2002 report to the US Government on the annual costs of software defects. The report is entitled “The Economic Impacts of Inadequate Infrastructure for Software Testing“. Ultimately, it estimates that software defects cost the US economy $59.5 billion every year. Modelling such…
-
The colloquium
An “official communication” from early June demanded that all Engineering and Computing postgraduate students take part in the Curtin Engineering & Computing Research Colloquium. Those who didn’t might be placed on “conditional status”, the message warned. A slightly rebellious instinct led me to think of ways to obey the letter but not the spirit of…
-
Old computers
The Linux boot up message of the moment: / has gone 49710 days without being checked, check forced. This would place the manufacturing date of the computer in question at around 1872 or earlier; a century before the UNIX epoch (the official Dawn of Time for UNIX-based computers) and at least 86 years prior to…
-
Meta-engineering
I’m beginning to think I should have approached this maths modelling stuff from an engineering point of view: with a requirements document, version control and unit testing. Constructing a reasonably complicated mathematical model seems to have enough in common with software development that such things could be quite useful. I’m calling this “meta-engineering”, because I’d…
-
What am I doing?
Over the past few weeks I’ve had numerous questions of the form: “how’s your work going?” I find I can only ever answer this with banalities like “good” or “meh”. It’s not that I don’t know what I’m doing. At any given point in time, I have a list of minor challenges written up on…
-
Horrible Java
Apologies to non-geeks. The following Java code determines whether infinity is even or odd. It compiles, runs, finishes immediately, and outputs “false” (meaning that infinity is odd). class Infinity \u007b static \u0062\u006f\u006f\u006c\u0065\u0061\u006e\u0020\u0065\u0076\u0065\u006e\u003b static { // Configure infinite speed System.nanoTime(\u002f\u002a); boolean even = true; double i = 0.0; while(i
-
The Zim desktop wiki
I’ve discovered that Zim is a great little brainstorming tool, for me at least. While I occasionally “think in images”, my brain usually works on words and symbols. A wiki – especially one that sports a LaTeX equation editor – seems to be a powerful way to assist a text-based brainstorming session. Being a desktop…
-
Theoretical frameworks, part 3
The [intlink id=”225″ type=”post”]first[/intlink] and [intlink id=”324″ type=”post”]second[/intlink] instalments of this saga discussed the thinking and writing processes. However, I also need to fess up to reality and do some measuring. A theoretical framework is not a theory. The point of a theoretical framework is to frame theories – to provide all the concepts and…
-
The university of technology
All Curtin students and staff know about OASIS. OASIS purportedly stands for “Online Access to Student Information Service” . Is that the best they could do, you ask? Evidentially, that full name is now such an embarrassment that it doesn’t seem to appear anywhere on the official OASIS website. However, I’m still not sure which…
-
Theoretical frameworks
One of the chapters of my much-delayed thesis describes (or rather will describe) a theoretical framework, which is academic-speak for “a way of understanding stuff” in a given field. In my case, stuff = software inspections, and my way of understanding them is a mixture of abstractions of abstractions of abstractions and some slightly crazy…