Three significant challenges facing the discipline of software engineering are understanding how software designers reason about policy, understanding how they define requirements based on this reasoning, and providing machine-based intelligent tools that support reasoning about policy. The authors are developing the concept of a policy workbench: knowledge-based tools that support reasoning about such properties of policies as consistency, completeness, and correctness, and the implications of policy for the behavior of a system. They discuss how such a workbench might help software designers reason about the relationships between policies and requirements.>

Abstract Testing a program designed to recognize several dozen kinds of anomalies in large volumes of input data requires test data with many combinations of the anomalies in the data stream. The large number of combinations of anomalies makes it impractical to generate test data manually. This paper describes a test data synthesizer designed to help verify the accuracy, capacity and correctness of such a program. The operation of the synthesizer is analogous to the Fourier synthesis of a periodic function. A sweep action permits test data with well known response to be combined in a methodical way to explore complicated interactions which are not well understood.

Abstract After seeing many programs written in one language, but with the style and structure of another, I conducted an informal survey to determine whether this phenomenon was widespread and to determine how much a programmer's first programming language might be responsible. This paper discusses my observations, gives informal results of the survey and suggests the need for a more formal study.

Mr. Vasonyi has written a book that contains something for everyone: the commercial programmer, the scientific programmer; the beginner and the experienced alike. Where then does the author fail? I found the exposition not unlike that of a cookbook—going from simple recipe to difficult recipe, giving each in detail but avoiding the general to emphasize the specific. When you have finished studying it, you may know all sorts of good recipes but that doesn't necessarily make you a chef.