Computer Programming as an Art Donald Knuth, 1974 Some programs are elegant, some are exquisite, some are sparkling. My claim is that it is possible to write grand programs, noble programs, truly magnificent ones! How do you follow David Parnas, Fred Brooks, and Tony Hoare? Perhaps with a little Donald Knuth... Today's choice is Knuth's ... Continue Reading

The Emperor's Old Clothes C.A.R. Hoare, 1981 Today we'll be looking at Tony Hoare's ACM Turing Award lecture from 1980, as published in the CACM in 1981. It's another piece that had a big influence on my professional career with its emphasis on the pursuit of simplicity, the need to tame complexity and ambition, and ... Continue Reading

No Silver Bullet: Essence and Accident in Software Engineering Fred Brooks, 1987 We hear desperate cries for a silver bullet - something to make software costs drop as rapidly as computer hardware costs do.... Not only are there no silver bullets now in view, the very nature of software makes it unlikely that there will ... Continue Reading

On the criteria to be used in decomposing systems into modules David L Parnas, 1971 Welcome back to a new term of The Morning Paper! I thought I'd kick things off by revisiting a few of my favourite papers from when I very first started this exercise just over two years ago. At that time ... Continue Reading

Identifying and quantifying architectural debt - Xiao et al., ICSE 2016 (Update: thanks to Lu Xiao for providing an open access version of this paper, the link above has now been updated to point to it.) So finally we have arrived at Xiao et al.'s 2016 ICSE paper (see the write-ups on Design Rule Spaces ... Continue Reading

Hotspot Patterns: The formal definition and automatic detection of architecture smells - Mo et al. International Conference on Software Architecture, 2015 Yesterday we looked at Design Rule Spaces (DRSpaces) and how some design rule spaces seem to account for large numbers of the error-prone files within a project. Today's paper brings us up to date ... Continue Reading

Design Rule Spaces: A new form of architectural insight - Xiao et al. ICSE '14 Continuing the theme of looking at ICSE 2016 papers, I want to share with you some interesting work by Xiao et al. on "Identifying and quantifying architectural debt." That paper however draws heavily on two previous works that it makes ... Continue Reading