Keynote Speakers
|
Life with Contracts
Bertrand Meyer, ETH Zurich, Switzerland
(Tuesday, June 12th, 9:30 - 10:30, Wallenbergaren room)
The native integration of Design by Contract techniques into a programming language has far-reaching consequences on most aspects of software construction, from project management to analysis, design, implementation, testing and maintenance. The keynote will present some results of a long-running experience of using contracts as a core practice of development. The talk will also include a presentation of new developments in applying contracts to verification and concurrency.
Presenter
 |
Bertrand Meyer is Professor of Software Engineering at ETH Zurich and ITMO (Saint Petersburg), as well as Chief Architect of Eiffel Software. He is the author of a number of books including the recent “Touch of Class” (Springer), a first introduction to programming using Eiffel and Design by Contract from the start. He has received a number of awards (ACM Software System Award, Harlan Mills prize, Dahl-Nygaard prize) and is currently starting a 5-year Advanced Investigator Grant from the ERC on “Concurrency Made Easy”. |
What is the Mission of a Software Developer?
Göran Backlund, Combitech, Sweden
(Wednesday, June 13th, 9:30 - 10:30, Wallenbergaren room)
Software is becoming increasingly important in society. In many industry products an ever growing proportion of the product value is based on our ability to develop software. But, are we developing software effectively and efficiently? Unfortunately, software development projects have no good track record in terms of time and budget. Why? Software products are complex, and are getting even more complex, but to a large extent we still rely on specifications written in natural language, and with a notion that we can fully specify beforehand a still non-existent product. If we take a usability perspective – with the end user in focus from the start – development takes another route. Also, many challenges in software development are seldom of technical nature – it is the people interaction issues that are the real challenges – understanding requirements, understanding written specs, understanding each other. What is the task really about? With a broader view on human knowledge in an engineering environment we can find new tools for learning to manage the challenges better.
Presenter
 |
Goran Backlund received his MSc 1983, and after two shorter employments he joined Saab Military Aircraft in 1986, and the Gripen fighter program. He worked for Saab for 12 years, as a system analyst, manager and project manager. Meanwhile he led the work of defining a model based approach to systems and software development. In the year 2000 he presented a licentiate thesis on the subject: "The effect of modeling requirements in the early phases of buyer/supplier relations". In 1998 Göran joined Combitech, the consultancy service subsidiary of Saab. Since then he has been working as a senior consultant, manager and business developer. In 2006 he successfully defended his PhD thesis "On tacit skills in engineering" where he accounted for the results of the engineer development programs that Combitech has developed the last decade, together with the Royal Institute of Technology. |
Multicore Processors - the Next Generation Computer for ESA Space Missions
Jean-Loup Terraillon, ESTEC/ESA, Netherlands
(Thursday, June 14th, 9:30 - 10:30, Wallenbergaren room)
The advent of multi-core on embedded processors boosts computational power for space applications reducing power consumption, thermal unbalancing, as well as storage volume and harness. Following the space industries' needs, ESA pursued the road of multi-core architectures: they enable the execution of more complex control algorithms and open the door to a higher degree of autonomy on-board, but they also shake the foundations of the traditionally used programming models, introducing the notions of real parallelism, more intense resource contention and synchronisation.
Presenter
 |
Jean-Loup Terraillon is an aeronautical engineer with special interest in avionics and software. In the French aeronautic industry, he has developed on-board software for head-up displays of aircraft's cockpit, and has been responsible for the software engineering team with focus on automatic code generation from models. Moving in ESA in 1992, he was first a data handling engineer in charge of on-board software R&D and support to projects like EnviSat and MSG. He is now the Head of the Software Engineering Section at the European Space Agency’s Technology Center, ESTEC, Noordwijk, the Netherlands. |