Abstract Software inspections are an intensely people‐centric activity. Even though this is routinely recognized in industry, much of the research focuses on inspection mechanics. During three years of inspection experiments, even though the main purpose of the experiments was to investigate the effectiveness of a particular technique, the inspectors involved provided broad comments on many other aspects of inspections. Their comments were collected and organized into themes. These themes are presented here as a set of maxims that cover all the topics that the inspectors felt were important as they endeavoured to do good inspections. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

There is increasing urgency to put software engineering (SE) programs in place at universities in North America. For years, the computer science and professional engineering communities neglected the area, but both are now paying serious attention. There is creative tension as efforts accelerate to define the field faster than is possible. This paper discusses a set of four software degree programs that have evolved over 14 years at a small university with close ties to one software community. The context is computer engineering in a department of electrical and computer engineering, so the natural domain is software that is close to the hardware. This means an emphasis on real-time, embedded, and, to a lesser extent, safety critical issues. The newest of the four programs is a Ph.D. program. It demonstrates that Ph.D. programs can be created with limited resources, given the right circumstances. If similar circumstances exist in other small universities, the rate of Ph.D. production in software engineering may be able to be increased, while maintaining quality. This paper describes the four degree programs, how they are related to each other, and how the programs have evolved. It makes limited comparisons to programs at other universities.

Abstract This paper discusses rendezvous on multiprocessors. Three different approaches are compared, represented by three specific systems: Ada, Harmony and BNR Pascal. All three permit tasks to run on multiple processors and use blocking communications primitives, but there are significant differences. For example, control over replying to messages out of sequence and over the allocation of tasks to processors is omitted in Ada, but is available in Harmony. The approach represented by BNR Pascal follows a middle road between Harmony and Ada: a low level protocol, invisible to the programmer, is used to ensure communications reliability, but the programmer is aware of when a rendezvous is remote. If performance considerations and verbosity and robustness are ignored, all three approaches are equivalent. To illustrate this equivalence, and to demonstrate clearly the complexity of the Ada rendezvous, an Ada rendezvous administrator written using Harmony is described. A second method of adapting Harmony to Ada is also presented, in which the Harmony primitives are modified to be closer to Ada. In practice, using Harmony primitives directly will usually result in better programs. It is argued that something very much like the rendezvous adminstrator is needed for any actual implementation of the Ada rendezvous.

Process scheduling, an important issue in the design and maintenance of hard real-time systems, is discussed. A pre-run-time scheduling algorithm that addresses the problem of process sequencing is presented. The algorithm is designed for multiprocessor applications with preemptable processes having release times, computation times, deadlines and arbitrary precedence and exclusion constraints. The algorithm uses a branch-and-bound implicit enumeration technique to generate a feasible schedule for each processor. The set of feasible schedules ensures that the timing specifications of the processes are observed and that all the precedence and exclusion constraints between pairs of processes are satisfied. the algorithm was tested using a model derived from the F-18 mission computer operational flight program.>

The development of pre-run-time schedulers for certain hard real-time applications is investigated. This scheduling scheme requires the modeling of the program as a set of processes with corresponding timing specifications, such as release times, computation times, and deadlines. The models must specify precedence and exclusion constraints between pairs of processes. It is processed by an offline pre-run-time scheduling algorithm that computes a schedule for use at run time, ensuring that all static timing constraints of the system are observed. The technique works best in cases in which most processes are periodic, which is true for the F-18. A modeling process for the M18 Mission Computer software that is designed to lead the application of pre-run-time scheduling to the software and is applicable to other such hard systems is described.>