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I wrote in a recent article about my views on why software engineering research has had very little direct impact on software engineering practice. I identified three short-comings in the research community that I believe has contributed to this namely short-term thinking, a mistaken belief in reductionism and a failure to cooperate rather than compete. To be fair to the research community,…
This article was prompted by responses to a tweet I wrote in response to an analysis of the research area of papers submitted to the 2022 ICSE conference, the flagship conference for software engineering research. These led me to reflect on software engineering research in general. I’m sorry to say that I think that we, as a community, have not really delivered very much that’s substantive in over…
I decided to switch to Hugo for my web sites a couple of years ago after almost 10 years of using a Wordpress site. I got fed up with the maintenance overhead of Wordpress, its security problems (my site was hacked a couple of times), its slowness and its appalling image management system. The key advantage of using a static site generator is that everything is on your own computer and you…
Adobe Portfolio is a web builder that is part of the Adobe Creative Cloud ecosystem. It is specifically designed to showcase images with the target market being photographers and designers who use the Creative Cloud suite. It isn’t available without a Creative Cloud subscription. The USP of Adobe Portfolio is that it is integrated with Lightroom, a photo management and editing system that is also…
Adobe Portfolio is a web builder that is part of the Adobe Creative Cloud ecosystem. It is specifically designed to showcase images with the target market being photographers and designers who use the Creative Cloud suite. It isn’t available without a Creative Cloud subscription. The USP of Adobe Portfolio is that it is integrated with Lightroom, a photo management and editing system that is also…
My photography has taken a back seat for the past couple of years. We have additional family responsibilities (twin grandchildren), we’ve moved from a semi-rural environment near Aberdeen to suburban Edinburgh, we bought a house that needed major work that has dragged on and on and, of course, we’ve been living with COVID restrictions. I’ve had no motivation to take any photographs except family…
My thoughts on whether to buy an electric car or a petrol car with carbon offsetting by tree planting. My car is now 10 years old and has done over 90, 000 miles. It’s starting to show its age and I’ve started thinking about replacing it. I want to do what I can to reduce my personal carbon footprint so I’ve been wondering about an electric car. Now, of course, you might say just give up your car…
An introduction to modern software engineering In 1981, I wrote a short book that was an introduction to software engineering for computer science students. This covered most of software engineering as it was at that time. Virtually all software was then developed in ‘projects’, where a client supplied the ‘requirements’ and the software was implemented by a separate team. Over the years, the…
Should an independent Scotland consider introducing a universal basic income? During this Coronavirus lockdown. many people, including me, have been posting on blogs and social media about their current or past lifestyle. They write about and share photographs of meals they have cooked, bread they have baked, things they have crafted and walks and holidays they have enjoyed in the past. A…
In this state of lockdown, we are all constrained in where we can travel and who we can meet. We should stay close to home so trips to the hills or the seaside for walking or photography are impossible. I make a point of getting out for a local walk for an hour or so every day so I set myself a wee challenge to chose 10 images taken from 10 walks on consecutive days.
My first Challenge did not start well. As a newbie, I decided that the most sociable way to start was to catch the ‘Challenger Special’ from Glasgow to Mallaig and this meant taking a fairly early train from Stonehaven. On our way to the station, I mentally ran through the list of what I should have with me when I realised with horror that I’d been messing around with my compass…
A while ago, I set myself a 365 photographic challenge where I photographed something that was food related every day for a year and posted it on what was then my first blog. I haven’t looked at these for years but I just checked and it’s still there. I have done bits and pieces of food photography since then but nothing for the past few years. I’m still interested in food and…
Why I believe that leaving the EU has the inevitable consequence of the break up of the UK? I originally wrote this post shortly after the Brexit referendum in 2016. I set why I have changed my views on Scottish independence and why I believe that Scotland should be an independent nation that us part of the EU. Since then, we have had years of uncertainty, the election of a right-wing, pro-Brexit…
The word ‘photography’ derives from two Greek roots, which roughly translated mean ‘light’ and ‘to draw’ so photography means ‘drawing with light’. It isn’t ‘copying with light’ because when photography was introduced it did not reproduce what was in front of the camera exactly as seen. Individuals draw the same scene differently, emphasising what is important to them, and until not so long ago,…
The Water of Leith is a short river that runs from its source in the Pentlands to the Firth of Forth at Leith. There’s a path along most of it, starting at Balerno and finishing at Leith. It’s about 13 miles (19km) and flat so it’s an easy day’s walk. As it’s a linear walk, I think it best to use Edinburgh’s excellent buses rather than a car to get to the start.
In 2016 there was a proposal to build a 26-turbine windfarm in Glen Dye. I’d never been there and I thought that I should have a walk there before the monstrosity was built. I’m in favour of renewable energy and wind farms have their place in this. However, I think they should be built in areas of low amenity - not in wild land. I decided to do a round trip over Clachnaben then from…
The TGO Challenge is an annual event where people walk across Scotland from the west to the east coast. They choose their own route and there are various meeting points, such as Braemar, where participants congregate. I’ve taken part in this 4 times (so far) and I hope to be able to do a few more. I’ve documented my Challenges under a separate heading. The TGO Challenge
I have been spending more time exploring the possibilities for monochrome images in landscape photography. The problem with colour landscapes, especially in good weather, is that the colours dominate and distract. Sometimes the colours are critical eg. for sunrises and sunsets, but often I think monochrome images are better at communicating an atmosphere and capturing the essence of a place. Oxen…
Edinburgh is unusual in the it has its own hill called Arthur’s Seat close to the centre of the city. It’s in Queen’s Park, a large green space at the foot of the Royal Mile. I’ve walked up Arthur’s Seat countless times and in all weathers apart from torrential rain. I normally walk up Arthur's Seat from the west by walking over the Meadows to the Commonwealth…
Autumn is the most colourful season and, like most outdoor photographers, I love to get out to photograph the landscape at that time of year. Obviously the landscapes are beautiful but I also like to look at a smaller scale for autumn details. Most of the images here were taken close to my home in Aberdeenshire with a couple on visits to the Highlands. River Faskally, near Pitlochry River Broom…
Cul Mor and Cul Beag (Mor is Gaelic for big; Beag for small) are easily accessible hills from the road north from Ullapool. I’ve climbed them botha couple of times but, sadly, never in good weather. This walk was probably the best - not much rain but thick damp mist on the tops. We had views for about 5 minutes during a brief clearance. We took the standard route, the path of the A835 by…
Lots of people talk about ‘complex systems’ and ‘complex issues’ and we are never sure if different people mean the same thing when they use the word ‘complexity’. I’m interested in this in the context of large software-intensive systems but the I think the discussion here is equally applicable to other types of system such as ‘the healthcare…
Reductionism is a philosophical position that a complex system is nothing but the sum of its parts, and that an account of it can be reduced to accounts of individual constituents (wikipedia). This notion is the foundation for the engineering of large systems – essentially, design a system so that it is composed of discrete parts which, because they are smaller, are easier to understand and…
I recently re-read Mark Maier’s now classic systems engineering paper ‘ ‘Architecting Principles for Systems of Systems’. In that paper, Maier suggests that the difference between a general system and a system of systems are that some of the elements of an SoS are operationally and managerially independent. This means that these systems can operate and provide useful services outside of the SoS…
I wrote my first computer program in 1970 and have been involved in software engineering research and teaching since the late-1970s. So I have lived through changes to computer generations from mainframes to minicomputers to PCs and mobile devices. I started using the Internet in the early 1980s and my first web site was published in 1995. I was born in Glasgow, Scotland and educated at…
Many students find videos helpful in developing their understanding so I have made a number of videos on a range of software engineering topics. Many of these were made to support a course I was teaching in Critical Systems Engineering, so there is a focus on system security and dependability. Some of the videos cover material (such as SCADA control systems) that is not covered in the book. I have…
This course was presented as part of an Engineering Doctorate (EngD) course in Large-scale Complex IT Systems at York University. Students had a background in computer science or engineering and were all working on systems research projects in conjunction with industry. Aim of the course The aim of the course was to introduce socio-technical systems and explain why socio-technical issues are…
Large-scale complex IT systems(LSCITS) are organizational systems, used by a range of stakeholders with differing goals and priorities. Their scale and complexity means that they may exhibit unexpected behaviour and performance and changing these systems can be difficult and have unpredictable consequences. Usually, LSCITS are made up of a number of other systems (sometimes, they are referred to…
Many software systems are now critical systems whose failure can have serious economic, human and social consequences. This course is an advanced software engineering course that is focused on system dependability and security and how business-critical, safety-critical and mission-critical systems can be developed. For critical systems, we need to be confident that system failure will not have…
This page summarises my research career from its beginnings as a PhD student in the 1970s to my retirement from St Andrews University in 2014. I have published lots of papers during that time – my Google Scholar profile includes a reasonably complete list (at least of those papers that are available on the Web). Early research I completed my PhD at St Andrews University in 1977 where I worked in…
Like lots of things in life, I got into writing technical books through a fortunate correspondence of events. As a young lecturer at Strathclyde University in Glasgow, I volunteered to present a course on large-scale software (so called) and I wrote a set of notes for this. My then colleague, Andrew McGettrick had recently taken on the role of series editor for a new UK book series to be produced…
In the 1980s and 1990s, universities started to introduce software engineering courses into their computer science degree programs. At that time, software engineering was dominated by the problems of creating large custom software systems. These were developed by managed teams working on long-lifetime software projects. This project-based approach was reflected in software engineering courses and…
One of the first books of photographs that I bought in the 1970s was entitled ‘Edinburgh’ by Douglas Corrance. As well as the ‘tourist’ sights of Edinburgh, Douglas also included more intimate and quirky images that captures the people and details of the places. I really liked this approach and I’ve collected here ten images that present an alternative view of…
We were staying in Ullapool for a mountaineering club dinner and it looked like a typical dreich November day. Low cloud and no sign of a break in the sky. We debated what to do and my pal Dave said that one of the Corbetts that he had still to do was Ben Hee in Sutherland. Others decided on a low-level walk to keep below the clouds but four of us decided to head north to Ben Hee.
The unexpectedly early arrival of our first grandchild in spring 2019 meant that the last two weeks has been a blur of driving up and down the A90, hospital visits, homecoming and helping the new parents adjust to sleep deprivation. Writing deadlines have been missed; social media skimmed at best and email ignored. Thankfully, Mum and baby are both fine and the baby, at least, is thriving. I’ve…
Visiting family in Edinburgh last weekend, Saturday dawned misty and gloomy. My wife and daughters decided to have what they call an ‘Edinburgh Saturday’, which consists of a leisurely lunch, a couple of hours of shopping then cocktails somewhere. I am not at all welcome (thankfully) at such gatherings so I decided that, in spite of the weather, I would get out for a walk somewhere. One of the…
Mount Keen is the nearest Munro to where we live but it’s a bit of a lump. Lochnagar is the nearest ‘interesting’ hill, which is about 90 minutes drive from our house. Lochnagar is one of my favourite hills. I first climbed there in the 1970s in the days when I was into winter climbing and I’ve been to the top countless times since then. Winter climbing on Black Spout Buttress This year, I was…
I gave a talk a while ago about complexity and large-scale systems. In the discussion following the talk, one of the audience suggested that what we should be doing is making our systems simpler, not more complex. Simplicity is one of the Holy Grails of computer science. Edsger Dijkstra, a pioneering computer scientist, emphasised the importance of simplicity in the 1960s and ever since then, the…
I said I’d do it and I did. Today, I got started on a training walk for TGOC-2014. This was in an unlikely location - Scotland’s capital. We were in Edinburgh for my daughter’s birthday and I didn’t have the option of a day in the north. I didn’t have any work today that had to be done, the sun was shining so I thought that I’d do the 7 hills of Edinburgh.
Our plans today were to head home from Edinburgh but my wife decided that she’s like to go with our daughter to the Ideal Home Show in Glasgow. This did not appeal to me one bit so I had a free day for a wee dauner in the Pentlands. I wrote this post several years ago but I thought it worth preserving as it’s a relatively uncommon Pentlands walk. I decided that, to reflect my walk…
Scotland’s weather is notoriously fickle so when you head for the hills in November, you hope for the best but plan for the worst. Sometimes, the worst happens but sometimes you get one of these unforgettable days on the hill. Typically, you start off in poor weather wondering if you should have taken the ‘sensible’ option of a coastal walk, where you might actually see something. But then the…
An introduction to the Cloud for people who don’t care how it works but want to know how it might be useful for them. There are basically two ways in which computers are used: Personal computers which are used by one person (or sometimes a family) and which can store data, run applications and so on. Shared computers where the computer is shared by a number of different people and which, usually,…
Rising just over 500 metres from the North-East lowlands, Bennachie is an iconic hills for folks from Aberdeen and the surrounding area. I guess that a large chunk of the population of Aberdeen have been up Bennachie at least once and it has it’s own conservation charity, the Baillies of Bennachie. It’s about 45 minutes drive from where I live so it’s not exactly a local hill. Nevertheless, I like…
I walked the West Highland Way in the first week of May in 2012 as my first long-distance walk after many years where I only had time for day walks. I was concerned about both my fitness and over-crowding on the path. It turned out that I was still fit enough and there were fewer people than I expected. I think starting on a week-day rather than a week-end helped here.
Changing technology platforms, for whatever purpose, is always a disruptive experience. You get used to the features and the inbuilt assumptions made by a platform, such as Wordpress, and develop an internal model of how to use the platform to do what you want. When you change platform, your tendency is to try and adapt what you kow to that platform. However, this rarely works as each platform is…
I guess that most Challengers take photos of their walk and there are some great landscape photos on Challenger blogs. I’ve been learning about digital photo manipulation recently so I thought that instead of the usual colour pictures, I’d present a more impressionistic view of my Challenge, in monochrome. Some of these I’m pleased with and I think they capture the atmosphere well; others, I’m not…
Challenge blogs from recent years are full of tales of derring-do as Challengers write of their gonad-freezing experiences wading Highland rivers in spate after several days of rain and battling through Monadliath blizzards. Folks experienced black hole of Calcutta conditions as innumerable people crammed into squalid bothies because it was too windy to pitch their tents. The weather, to put it…
Fundamentally, any route across the Highlands falls into 3 logical parts - the West, between the coast and the Great Glen, the middle between the Great Glen and eastern Cairgorms and the East, which is the bit from Glen Muick/Clova/Ballater to the coast. The middle is the biggest bit as you need to get across two bits of high country - from the Great Glen to the A9 and then across the Cairngorms.
Day 8: Glen Feshie to Mar Lodge I woke up to cloud but the weather looked set to improve as I set off - as ever, I was not early and a few Challengers had already passed me although they had stayed at the bothy or camped further down the glen. The upper part of the Glen is not as attractive as the more wooded lower Glen Feshie and, after crossing the watershed, the path was pretty boggy and a wee…
It is now 2 weeks since I got back from the 2015 TGO Challenge, when I walked from Lochailort to Stonehaven. I blogged about my route when I planned it and, more or less, stuck to the planned route. I didn’t do a hill on Day 3 as it was chucking it down so I road-bashed along Loch Arkaig; I took to the forest roads to the south of Loch Rannoch - a longer but less tiring route, and, in spite of a…