The Open University's M880 Software Engineering is a postgraduate distance education course aimed at software professionals. The case study element of the course (approximately 100 hours of study) is presented through an innovative interactive multimedia simulation of a software house Open Software Solutions (OSS). The student 'joins' OSS as an employee and performs various tasks as a member of the company's project teams. The course is now in its sixth presentation and has been studied by over 1500 students. In this paper, we present the background to the development, and a description of the environment and student tasks.

We discuss the ‘software crisis’ as a social and cultural phenomenon, arguing that it can be viewed as (one more) manifestation of postmodernism. We illustrate our argument with a range of examples taken from software engineering, demonstrating software engineering's roots in (and commitment to) modernism and the nature of its fin de siècle predicament. We argue that current attempts within software engineering to respond to the software crisis have not been adequate and that a new, more humble, approach to software development is required.

We are designing a computer-based multi-media learning environment based on an imaginary software house to suppor~ professional postgraduate students studying a course on software development.The environment is intended to provide students with a realistic context for the practical application of techniques taught in the course, and a range of project work which will stimulate learning needs which are relevant to the course's learning objectives.Students will be expected to spend 120 study hours in connection with this environment.This paper describes the course and the environment and raises design issues we have encountered.

Abstract The term ‘inductive inference’ denotes the process of hypothesizing a general rule from examples. It can be considered as the inverse process of program testing, which is a process of sampling the behaviour of a program and gathering confidence in the quality of the software from the samples. As one of the fundamental and ubiquitous components of intelligent behaviour, much effort has been spent on both the theory and practice of inductive inference as a branch of artificial intelligence. In this paper, software testing and inductive inference are reviewed to illustrate how the rich and solid theory of inductive inference can be used to study the foundations of software testing.

Relational algebras as developed by Codd and his followers are extended by noting an equivalence with functional languages. This leads to higher order relations, recursive definitions of relations, and the use of higher order relations as recursive data structures. This equivalence on the one hand enables the technology of databases to be used within the context of applicative languages, and on the other hand removes the adhoc mechanisms used for higher order operations in relational databases. This leads from 4th to 5th generation data management, exploiting the mathematical foundations of functional languages and logic programming, and the technology of relational database.

This paper extends the relational algebra of data bases, presented by Codd [4] and others, in four areas. The first is the use of selector names to remove order dependencies from the columns of a relation. This use of selector names enables us to define a more general class of operations, which include the normal relational operations of union, equi-join etc., as special cases. Thirdly we introduce relations represented algorithmically as well as by a stored set of tuples. Such computed relations cannot always be effectively realised as a finite set of tuples. Finally we consider relational expressions as algorithmic representations of relations and characterize their effectiveness.

Pattern classifications are considered equivalent to computing a special function, and the problem in designing a machine is to reconstruct and approximate this function given only a finite set of samples from the function. Interpolation theory is applied to the problem and a variety of realisations are suggested. While the theoretical viewpoint is new and general, the realisations are shown to be equivalent to many existing solutions; however, this theory allows a systematic approach to design, with a firm and general background to convergence and error.