[SystemSafety] Logic

[Peter Bernard Ladkin]

Andrew,

I'm not sure I go along with cultural relativism when it comes to SW development.

A third of our curriculum in the first year is about how to program (algorithms, data structures,
functional programming in Haskell, "object-oriented" programming in Java). One-sixth of our
curriculum in the second year is group project programming. To be precise in terms of credit-point
arithmetic, that is formally 900 hours of work. That is half a person-year (more or less;
person-years vary per country).

Since, as I hope we all know by now, SW requirements specification and analysis is a sine qua non
for dependability, failures in this process accounting for some 70-90+% of dependable-SW failures,
one might imagine that SW requirements be addressed somewhere in this half-person-year.

Places such as Oxford, Cambridge and Imperial, all in the top-ten worldwide, offer substantial
education in skills associated with formal description languages. So, of course, does your alma
mater, with Alloy.

I really don't think the issue we face at Bielefeld is about what to cut out. The issue is more
people's understanding of what developing SW is all about.

PBL

On 2014-02-18 16:14 , Andrew Rae wrote:
> Peter,
> I think it is important, from a practical and political point of view, to acknowledge the competing
> demands on time and space in the undergraduate computing curriculum.

Prof. Peter Bernard Ladkin, Faculty of Technology, University of Bielefeld, 33594 Bielefeld, Germany
Tel+msg +49 (0)521 880 7319  www.rvs.uni-bielefeld.de