It's been a long time since I've written a CV! and I threw everything away, burned it. But having had a lot of contacts in these months, I was asked for my CV in English. So I took advantage of my notepad to try to put together a time. I wrote "don't waste time, don't read this, it's for when I lose my memory". I have published my memoirs here.
https://saintyrieixlaperche.wordpress.com/2015/11/19/mes-memoires-daredien-1946-1964/
But it was for historians, penniless and ecological ethnologists (the Limousin and the Périgord vert, we would be ridiculous if we asked for credits to go there to study the language and customs). It was also for the grandchildren, but I didn't convert to tic and toc
1946
It's silly! it wasn't my midwife mother who gave birth to me in the maternity ward of the hospital in Saint-Yrieix-la-Perche, the town that gave birth to the porcelain industry in France!
The school of barracks
I went to the "barracks" school. So young in the barracks! Always on foot. And my parents never took me to kindergarten, primary school, high school, university in the Posterior. I would have been ashamed. We used to say "the barracks" when it was a barracks, certainly "divided" in two, one girl, one boy..
In "cours élémentaire deuxième année" (CE2), I had a teacher who taught us the method of problem solving. It started from the southeast of the blackboard and went up to the northwest. I think that Claude Pair in Nancy had the same course.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claude_Pair
and his deductive method (Méthode déductive) or (Médée) Medea of programming. For the Middle Course (CM), I had an instituteur "teacher" who pulled the ears, the hair, manipulated the ruler, but also painted on the walls and framed with sticks nailed to the walls. He also practiced a modern pedagogy. His class was CM1/CM2. Those who had finished the CM1 exercises had to do the CM2 exercises, forbidden to watch Tiktok on their cell phone. And that's how I took my first exam, the sixth grade entrance exam (examen d'entrée en sixième), a year earlier than planned. But let's be honest, I didn't plan anything. I needed a school identity card. My mother took me to the photographer's house to take passport photos. When I specified the NNI (National Identity Number) in B notation, I remembered the photographer Later.
The middle school (collège), the Darnet high school (lycée Darnet)
My father had studied Latin. He had to leave high school in second grade. But he spent his winter Sundays doing Latin versions. He bequeathed me his Quicherat. I did Latin. The school was called "Jean-Baptiste Darnet" after the doctor who discovered kaolin (in fact it was his wife who used it to wash clothes who tipped him off). Later it was called high school. month.
I repeated the third grade. My mother told me "it's puberty". The certificate was not given at that time. Teacher, I had to insist on allowing students to repeat a year. They thanked me for that. In the IUT in two years, the program was too dense for those who did not make "dead ends": general economics, business economics, work organization, general accounting, analytical, communication techniques, English, mathematics, statistics, probability, operational research, projects with companies, operating system, numerical calculation, Fortran, 360 Assembler, Cobol, programming methods, networks, databases, Software Engineering Methods... and a three-month internship.
I did "Latin-maths", if I'm not mistaken, it was "C'".
After the "First Baccalaureate" (at the time there were two), I did the final year of "Philosophy". What for? The previous year, the "Maths Elem" had had poor results in the baccalaureate. The teacher, son of my father's teacher, had not dealt with part of the curriculum... who "fell" in the baccalaureate. I have kept my two books "Knowledge" and "Action". It was the philosophy teacher, Henri Desfougères (he had done his thesis on Spinoza) who for the first time spoke to us about sets and tables of truth! At that time, I didn't know what the "preparatory classes" were. I knew what medical studies were like. But having a very bad memory (a pain when you like history a lot), I didn't have the level and anyway I hated waking up in the middle of the night. But why do mothers give birth at night?
I wanted a job where you don't spend your time indoors. I thought of surveyor. And also to the natural sciences.
So the summer after the Terminale I signed up for distance learning to get up to speed in order to do SPCN (Natural Sciences, Physics, Chemistry). But while I was cycling around Auvergne, in a campsite a science teacher told me "there are no positions at the Capes, the oil search is over...). So I did "economics", I liked the history class on the 1929 crisis.
1964
Limoges
First year of faculty. At the time, economics had not become independent of the law. For 4 years, I did constitutional, civil, commercial, administrative and international law.
I just reread my math class notes. The first concerns sets, application to binary logic.
For the second year I went to Poitiers on Rabelais' land. I left Turgot's intendancy, the Place du Présidial, for the U Rabelais estate, then the U Descartes estate! Before, with a scholarship from the Department of Haute-Vienne, I hitchhiked around Europe, testing my cooking Latin in Italy, my German in Germany and Switzerland, and my English if necessary. In Venice I slept over the university computer.
1965
Poitiers
I was going to be able to feast on the standing stone!
"Gargantua devoted himself to the study of good letters and athletic exercises" [taking care, however, not to frequent] "certain colleges of pouilleux where the king could have set fire to them and burned both principal and regens" (Rabelais)
The license was in 4 years.
We had a very theoretical training. I could have applied for the position of Minister of the Economy and Finance! But I doubted that our ministers would make the Samuelson oscillator,
Nowadays, they practice like all the different models of the "cob web", whether it is Walresian or Marshallian, it's obvious! What interested me the most was the OR, Operational Research. I learned more about computer science (algorithms) than in the micro computer science course in the lecture hall. An engineer from INSEE came to talk to us about the dimensions of the punched card, the size of the holes, the weight of the card!
Every summer I spent a month at the Centre d'Etudes Economiques du Limousin, directed by Professor Guy Chambon. It was on this occasion that I discovered the Olivetti Programma 120. But we hadn't received it yet.
I am elected Commander of the Order of the Venerable Bitard (LST)
May 68
President of the Cercud. Pronounce correctly!
"Z caused a good deal of confusion on the pronunciation stakes. The English and even Scots and some French call it Zed. The Americans call it Zee and get confused when we correct them Zed. But Ib had his own distinctive pronunciation: Zet. (Bill Roscoe, In Memoriam ib Sorensen);
Z we'll talk about it again. Z is the cause of this boomer CV!
Cercle des résidents de la cité U Descartes, I had set up a photo lab, a discotheque (no, not a nightclub!) and a library. The Maoists brought their beautiful icy magazines from China. When I later learned that many journalists from France-Culture, France-Inter had just graduated from Normal Sup (not the one called ENSET!) and that they had been Maoists, I was not surprised by some of the front pages of Le Monde, including the one about the Khmer Rouge.
Le « mémoire » and the IAE
It was time for me to become independent. I did "a dissertation" i.e. a DES, also called "a diploma" (a Diploma of Higher Studies). There were a few classes, of teachers from Paris because after 68, the teachers of Poitiers had been pumped by Paris (Dauphine University, etc.). I chose "Deficit and fare options in the railway". I didn't have any supervisors. No proofreader. Why this subject? because behind my parents' house the train passed, Limoges-Brive line via Saint-Yrieix. And that for many years the question of its maintenance has been raised. It fed a large fuel depot (it was still the time when they were avoided at the borders). In addition, I was interested in the relations between public and private, and the increasing returns (those of the book are amazing). Finally, my grandmother from Excideuil sent me her wishes on cards representing trains, produced by "La vie du rail".
There was in several journals and thesis a so-called extract from an article by Boiteux. I had repeated my third year, but I found that the very elementary maths of the article were very surprising. I wrote to Marcel Boiteux. He replied! he was then director or president of EDF and president of the International Society of Econometrics. A big envelope. He told me that I was the first to have reported this typo. In the magazines, his article (which, if my memory serves me correctly, had appeared in La Rouge et la noire, the journal of the Polytechnicians) had been modified, then this error repeated. I also wrote to Maurice Allais. And I received another big envelope. I had a good bibliography at the time.
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/V%C3%A9rit%C3%A9_des_prix
In 1969, neither Gérard Debreu nor Maurice Allais had yet won the "Nobel Prize" in economics.
I always wanted to go and see for myself. I knew that our guy from Thiviers, Jean-Paul Sartre, had bad glasses when he went to the USSR.
Georges Pompidou, from Montboudif, a place I knew well, said that he wanted socialism in the Swedish style but with the sun. So I took advantage of a Knowledge of Sweden course organized by Stockholm University. It was after the brief. I was able to meet with the Minister of Transport. I went to the USA to live with 4 families for a month. I set foot on the soil of the USA when man landed on the moon. I returned to the campus of the University of Louisville, a twin city with Montpellier, and worked in a bank. I also went to cross the Iron Curtain between Vienna and Brastislava, in a 4L. Then in the USSR. Why do the Institute of Business Administration? Because I hadn't studied economics, which I learned there. I thought I had a better chance of getting a job in a company than as Minister of the Economy.
For two years I was an "instructor" (moniteur), the first pay of the Ministry of National Education. And this allowed me to read the announcement of a training course for teachers in "analysis-programming" for the computer science departments of the IUTs. In 1970, there was still compulsory military service. I obtained an "army-youth internship" at the CEL, Centre d'Essais des Landes in Biscarosse. I hadn't seen the Apollo rocket leave, but I did see a missile fired towards the Azores. I was in the "management information technology" department. At the National Assembly, a deputy had asked Michel Debré, then Minister of Defense, the cost of testing the Pluton missile. The Pluto missile was a short-range nuclear ballistic system launched from a missile ramp mounted on an AMX-30 tracked chassis.
This equipment was the French army's tactical nuclear deterrent during the Cold War. At CEL, a cost monitoring system had been set up. And I discovered inconsistent "data." Thus the cost of painting a Panhard AML 60 done at the CEL could vary from 1 to 5, with the same cost elements! What for? During the first painting, the painter took a can of paint out of stock. At the end of his work, he didn't throw away the rest of the painting. It did not "sink". He built up a "wild stock" of paint. When painting the next AML 60, he used some of the rest. He wasn't going to assign the paint bucket ID to different jobs multiple times, but some did. It had not been planned to convert the pot into liters of paint! Always a matter of flows and stocks. And the definition of objects.
I remembered this when, with the Merise method in France, we spoke of an "individual model". I discovered many wild stocks. The staff who were supposed to enter the work orders knew that the system was producing inconsistent results. And waited, while knitting, for the arrival of the next great chef who would certainly launch a new information system. And would leave before we saw the effects
1970
IUT de Montpellier
I don't know if there has been in history a lot of teacher training for an IUT specialty not taught in universities. My friend Marc Guyomard, who studied computer science in Rennes – at the time there were few universities where there were – told me that when he was recruited, he was asked if he had done any "analysis". He said yes. He had done "numerical analysis"! The ministry has created two training courses. One in Montpellier, for mathematicians, economists, physicists, etc., directed by Robert Reix, a Limousin. One in Toulouse for computer scientists, directed by Jacques Luguet, a Toulouse native, who in 1975 passed his thesis on S.C.A.P.F.A.C.E.: System for the automatic and progressive design of a database management system based on the conversational analysis of output states.
R. Reix's teaching has been the subject of two books published by Dunod, the first at the end of our training. When math students had economics classes, economists had math classes. But not "maths for computer science" courses that I will discover in the same collection as R. Reix's books with the books of J. Bottiaux from the IUT of Grenoble. For logic, my first books were those of François Chenique, Elements of Classical Logic and Understanding Modern Logic.
We had courses on the logic of circuits (the two volumes of Petitclerc, courses in machine language, 360 assembler (few hours). The "system" (operation) course was a sleepy video from IBM on the 360 OS. For Cobol, each course dealt with one or two instructions. We didn't have any courses in algorithmics, no programming methods. When we went with our pack of punched cards to the Faculty of Science, we didn't expect to see such a long list of people come out. It was not the expected release!
Those who wanted to could teach to the students of "Special Year" (Post Undergraduate Year). In Montpellier, many were pharmacy students. I remember giving a course on Simplex.
How did I end up in Nantes?
I didn't know yet that Nantes was the centre of the world according to Samuel Whittemore Boggs.
https://lefenetrou.blogspot.com/2025/03/albrecht-penck-nantes-au-centre-du.html
Grab a Michelin map of France. Draw a straight line from Montpellier to Saint-Yrieix-la-Perche. It passes through Limoges, Poitiers and Nantes! I had an offer of a position in Limoges by Guy Chambon, but I chose Nantes. Brittany is the Limousin and the Périgord Vert but also with the sea and the Breton dynamism.
1971 and subsequent years
I went on an internship at ICL in Nantes, to learn and practice the Cantor method
Assistant Delegate
In September, I started my teaching in the computer science department of the IUT, housed by the ENSM (Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Mécanique), which became ECN (Ecole Centrale de Nantes). I was a "delegated assistant".
Psychology, linguistics, logic, history of science
I did a degree in psychology. Fortunately, there was not only psychoanalysis! Part of the teaching took place at the Faculty of Science, psychophysiology with practical work, and a course in physical ergonomics. We need it nowadays when we are offered screens with light blue writing on a grey background!
I hadn't had any language lessons. So with a colleague I did the certificate in general linguistics at university. For logic, I took Jean-Louis Gardies' course. And did the certificate in the history of science. Having done a thesis in "Computer Science of Organizations" at Dauphine (another unsupervised work!), I applied via two sections of the CNU (I don't know if that was the name at the time), one of "management", one of "computer science". I was thrown out. And received two reviews. One "your file is more IT than management" and the other "your file is more management than IT". I went on an internship at ICL in Nantes, to learn and practice the Cantor method Assistant delegate.
In those years, I did a lot of computer training for the staff of the Nantes administrations, in companies (based on the work of people in training, learning a lot in the services, doing analyses). I went to CEPIA on the land of IRIA (now INRIA) at the Domaine de Voluceau in Rocquencourt for one week in spring and one week in autumn.
Certified Teacher
I went from Posterior to Secondary!
As the day before the holidays I was asked to go and do a training course in a company (status of assistant delegate!), one day I went to take a CAPET (Certificate of Aptitude for Technical Education). I never received the results of the competition. And the day before I was going to Japan, I passed by rue de Grenelle. I had never seen our Ministry of National Education. To the right of the large porch, on the wall, a notice board covered with a chicken coop fence. And I see the results of the competition, very fading. And it seems to me that I read my name on it. I went to the right department. And I was asked where the training center should be put (I don't remember the name of this center). Of course I chose Nantes. I was thanked for my cooperation.
At the beginning of the school year, the director of the IUT wrote to the rector. He needed me. So I kept my service at the IUT and I passed an inspection during a class in high school. I remember. I dared to explain the reason for Wilson's model formula. The inspector accused me of not respecting the program. Fortunately, in the IUT, we did not have an inspection. Let's go back to Japan. On a beach on an island opposite Hiroshima where I was camping, I met a Japanese computer scientist. He was familiar with J.D. Warnier's LCP and LCS methods. very proud to show myself by drawing on the sand, a small specification according to the LCS notation.
Then I went back to the Posterior
Assistant Professor (maître-assistant)
The following year I was a "senior lecturer" in management in the management department. I was frowned upon. 80% of the hours planned in the PPN (National Pedagogical Program) for computer science were distributed among the teachers, there were plenty of "leaders, group, subject, year, internships,.... The director of the town hall's IT department was giving a few hours of lessons there. I took his place, but he opened up the IT services of all the town halls in France. And the symposiums of municipal computer scientists and the executive school of the CFPC (Centre de Formation des Personnels Municipaux. I set up programming tutorials. We had PCs with tape cassette players. Then floppy-disks. I was teaching structured programming. The students had the Basic translation of "if then otherwise", "repeat until", "as long as to do", "do until".
I worked on an economics thesis on pricing between public companies, private companies, and public administration. Following my internship at the CEL and my DES thesis. But I couldn't find any thesis supervisor. I remember writing to Jacques Chirac, the Prime Minister, to have access to a report from the Court of Auditors. I still haven't received his reply!
One day I "went up" to Paris (we often went up there) and went to see the Minister of Economy and Finance, Giscard d'Estaing. Easy to find! You go from the street to the courtyard of the Louvre under a large porch. You go up the stairs that lead to the porch. Giscard was invited to lunch by French people, he could well receive me. Bad luck, the bailiff told me that he wasn't there. It was easier in Sweden where the minister paid for his ticket for the ministry's canteen.
Lecturer (maître de conférences)
Then I received a letter telling me that I was in the Computer Science section. I became a "lecturer" in computer science and then a "lecturer".
University Professor
One day I passed an HDR (Habilitation à Diriger des Recherches) and I got a position as a "University Professor". No difficulties. At the time, there were very few candidates in the field of software engineering and methods.
2002
Abelard at the dawn of universities
Yves Tanguy, whom I had known when I arrived at the IUT in Computer Science, had become president of the University of Nantes. He called me one day to ask me to organize a conference on Pierre Abélard. He had read my blog. I was quoting Abelard. Normal, when I arrived in Nantes I went to Le Pallet, Abelard's homeland and then to Liré to Du Bellay. I had read Umberto Eco, I had all the records of Brassens. Y. Tanguy showed me the letters received from "specialists" in Nantes. They were not happy!
I have filled my library with books by philosophers, ancient logicians, historians, musicologists... and organized an international conference according to the procedures known in science, reading committee, call for papers. And with a set of "general public" conferences. With my weak memory I was very stressed. Especially when I had to do a TV show. I went around the places where Abelard and Heloise had lived.
I then wrote articles on specifications, the quarrel of universals... but I was thrown out when I wanted to publish them. I "pissed in a violin" a lot. Currently on this point I am rereading Plato's Phaedrus.
Self-taught, but urban cyclist
In computer science, I am self-taught. I very much regretted not having done a degree in computer science. And to have studied compilers. But it only existed in a few universities in France. The center was at... the east, Grenoble.( From Big Data to AI: 60 years of experience in data, information and knowledge processing in Grenoble, Michel Adiba, Jean-Pierre Giraudin, UGA édition, 2024), then Nancy.
I would like to thank all the Turing Prize winners who have written very educational books within my reach, those who have given presentations at Inria, presentations that were immediately transformed into teaching, all these authors, practitioners who published, the computer scientists with whom I have taught and done projects. And those who opened the doors of their company's machine room to us during the night (there was no "study machine" at the time).
I was secretary of the CILO (Club Informatique Loire Océan) and organized conferences every Thursday at the IUT by bringing in speakers on current themes. I am thinking of the President of the CNIL, and Serge Abiteboul (now at the Academy of Sciences), and many others. I went several times to give courses at the software engineering exhibition days organized in Toulouse by Jean-Claude Rault. And I took over in Nantes by creating the series "Putting into practice methods and tools for information system design".
Michael Jackson, whose writings I really appreciated, the JSD method (so far from Merise!) came twice. The first time I received a lot of calls from parents for their children! The second time, he agreed to give a course to the students. He started in French, I asked him to continue in English. I always remember their remark: "with English you have to pay attention to what you say". I had succeeded. Students continued their studies in England.
Jean-Raymond Abrial whose "Data Semantics" I had read... which had led me to go and see on the spot in Cargèse in Corsica, sent me his first writings on what was not yet called B. Students from the Cnam worked on these documents. Abrial came in 1994 to give a course on B, recorded on VHS cassettes that the IUT distributed to schools in France, Europe and as far away as Stanford.
One day, a British colleague who was looking for French institutions to exchange with the University of Teessside and the University of York, came to Nantes... attracted by Z, whom he called "his lingua franca". With Erasmus projects (in those days the IUTs were entitled to them!), I was able to introduce the work of Tony Hoare, Robin Milner, which "fitted" well with Mr. Jackson's writings. After VDM, Z suited me well because I had written my first book at Eyrolles "The binary relational model, AI, NIAM", a method practiced at the Crédit Mutuel Loire Ocean Computer Center
I created the first international conference on B. After the one on Z to B. Since then, it has always taken place. The next one will be in Dusseldorf. And the conference, The B method, from research to teaching.
1-10-2008
Retirement as "professor emeritus"
Master 2 in the history of science at the François Viète Centre
of the Faculty of Science of Nantes. Easy! in front of the computer lab. I then wanted to do a thesis on the history and epistemology of software development methods, but I couldn't find a supervisor
2011 Year of Vialatte
I am a Member of the Club of Vialattians notoriously unknown
2025 I got caught...
This year, we will deal with the history of Jean-Raymond Abrial's work.
From the LTR language (used at the Arsenal d'Indret - it reminds me of the contract with the Arsenal during which I spent a week at the Abbey of Fontevraud, it's not on the Richard the Lionheart road!), to the ADA language, to the Socrate DBMS (also used in Indret), Z, B, Event-B
I refer you to the introduction of this blog post. Blogs! it's old-fashioned! too long to read. I had found the right title of my blog: Let's hope that no one will say "quoras will you have 'chabat de platussar?" when will you have finished blablaware? "When will you stop quacking?" What has always been underlying my publications?
I copy this for you:
« ...we find that our customers are not very good at deciding on their requirements. ... Traditionally, we software developers have thought of our customers as bears of very little brain. ’ They don’t know what they want’, we said to each other smugly. But in truth we achieved this superior perspective only by virtue of our own limitations and failures. We were the bears of very little brain” Michaël Jackson 1995
« ...we find that our customers are not very good at deciding on their requirements. ... Traditionally, we software developers have thought of our customers as bears of very little brain. ’ They don’t know what they want’, we said to each other smugly. But in truth we achieved this superior perspective only by virtue of our own limitations and failures. We were the bears of very little brain” [Jac95]
Considering that it is the rôle of the software developers to ask the right questions to the customer as it is a doctor to ask the right questions to their patient. Considering that, if the “The programmer’s task is ... to give a formai proof that the program he proposes meets the equally formal functional specification.” [Dijkstra 89], “This is a noble goal, but it presupposes that someone else has done all the hard work by managing to create a formai functional specification that is appropriate to the task at hand.”, we proposed to the international software community that they answer :
“What questions are prompted by ones particular method of specification ?”
for a small case study about invoicing. Primarily, the workshop will be the event where these questions are presented. However, it will also provide an opportunity to :- present the specification of the ‘invoicing function’ through different methods, formalisms, languages- compare different methods, formalisms, languages over the same case study
This workshop is the 9th meeting of the series “Putting Into Practice Methods and Tools for Information System Design”.
The conference will start with an invited presentation about the industrial application of two methods with two different paradigms, B and LDS/SD
Introduction
Henri HabriasIRIN, Université de Nantes
In [Win88], Jeanette M. Wing studied 12 specifications of the Library Problem, spécifications that were published in different papers, each one illustrating a method. Ten years after, we proposed to colleagues to specify another problem, the Invoicing Problem, but following a common protocol.
The name of the exercise was :“What questions are prompted by ones particular method of specification ?”
For several persons our call for paper was disconcerting. The academic person likes to be in his domain. Was this workshop for System Engineering specialists. Requirement Engineering specialists, for the Formal Specification specialists, for the Object Orientation specialist, etc. ? Very often, formal methods people (more exactly, working on formal notations) consider that they dispose an unambiguous requirements text. Semi-formal methods people. more ambitions (very often the less you are formal the more you are ambitions, what can be expressed saying “the more it is hollow, the more you can put in it”) don’t hesitate to cover ail steps going from the informal to the formal (being the executable code for them). Some consider that even the non formal methods are not adequate to obtain good requirement i.e. a sufficient requirement for the semi-formal or formal method specialist (what is exactly sufficient requirement ? is it the same thing for ail the methods specialists ?...).We consider that it is the specifiers responsibility (finally is it not what we want?) to write the specification. To write the specification is not an algorithmic job, it is not an automatic transformation (and, by definition, it will never be). In medicine, several centuries were needed to invent what is named “clinic”. Clinicians are doctors in medicine. They do not consider that they do not need the medical science. Meanwhile they know that it is with their science that they can make observations, find questions to ask, make and verify hypothesis, make deductions, etc. After the reception of the first proposals, we were surprised - yet, not so much ! - by the fact that very few questions were asked in the papers. Sometimes we found some sentences as “We suppose that ...”. As Jules Renard, a French writer, said “writing is a way of speaking without being interrupted”. Computer scientists manifestly do not like neither consider what the client want and raise up questions, nor to propose choices. Some other remarks could be done on the first versions of the papers :- some authors create bad interpretations (they rewrite the text into a more ambiguous one) in order to say : with my method, I found that I misinterpreted the informal text.- very few authors answered the question : “What questions are prompted by ones particular method of specification?”- several authors discussed in fact with technical problems linked to their formalism. They asked themselves questions dealt with how to say something using their formalism and not what to ask the customer on what he has in mind. Thought it was here the first aim of the exercise. In consequence we precised our aims with the following text :“It is not up to the computer scientist to decide what the invoicing function is. It is not up to a doctor to decide the illness of their patient. It it was so, the customer would not need to consult a doctor ! The doctor must ask the right questions of his customer. It is the same thing for an architect, etc. ”
Aims of the papers :- The principal goal of this exercise is to know what questions are raised by your favorite method(s) (it is in the title of the workshop!)
- questions on the informal text You ask questions (you write these questions in the paper) when the question arrives (show connection with your method or formalism).You choose one answer and you specify ... and you continue by asking other questions, etc ..
.- questions on your method
- The second goal is to present your method, formalism through a small example (every used concept has to be given an example in the cases study). One should not first give a copy of text we can find on the method in other papers and then give the specification following the method/formalism. It is important to do the two things together. NB. : you can consider the beauty (perhaps synonymous of facility) of your specification. But, please, remember that our principal goal is to know what invoicing function the customer has in his head, and perhaps to explain to the customer when they are being inconsistent
.- The set of ail the papers will serve to help to compare the methods/formalisms, particularly from the point of view of what is covered by the method. In other terms, we want to know of you “have you the capacity to obtain information from the user” ? We would like as a product of your work to have a new text in natural language expressing your specification (taking into account your questions, answers and consistency checks) at the end of your paper. The Library Problem as studied by J.M. Wing was written in a “database” orientation. Its structure was the following : a list of transactions, a relation indicating who can execute what transaction, and a list of constraints on the state of the database. 10 years after the paper of J.M. Wing, we propose to study a very short informal text on invoicing. It is well known that many people think they know what invoicing is, everyone being accustomed to pay invoices. One would think that the specifier would ask different questions than the layperson, and not restrict themselves to a superficial understanding of invoicing. Whether the authors, thanks to their method, language or formalism would bring an added value to the informal text of the specification was one of our question. Our hypothesis were :
that working with different paradigms (we tried to obtain papers from people of the “real time community”, of the “reactive languages”, of the “protocol community”) the specifiers would ask different sets of questions
that specifiers treat only what they know how to specify, applying the principle enonced by the French poet Cocteau “As these problems overcome us, we feign not to know of them”
that the “solutions” of case studies written following a method, are very often written after having been obtained without the method,
that, very often, the tools used are not appropriate, being a power hammer to kill a fly
that the tools are often not used where they could be useful
that the specifiers make classifications of application domains without clear criteria, considering that such and such method is specific to a class of application domain. Name of domains such as “information Systems”, “database”, “business”, etc. are in fact names for domains of competence. (Some contacted people answered : it is a business application, it is not our domain). Some years ago, “information Systems” people (term used for database !) said that the M. Jackson’s JSD method was not for business applications because it uses the paradigm of sequential process and refers explicitly to T. Hoare’s CSP. It was curious that meanwhile some people refereed the JSD’s book Jac83] saying that JSD was data oriented (in fact they were confusing the JSD’s trees and the JSP’s trees). More curious was the fact that M. Jackson was treating in his book examples as invoicing, lift control, a lift control being not classified usually in the "information System” domain.
Perhaps the difference between a practitian (an engineer) and an academic is that the latter is always able to adapt his perception of the reality to be able to sell his theory, whereas the first has to respect the reality even if we cand always say that “there is no reality, there are only perceptions of reality”.
Facing the difficulty to make our aims understood, we asked ourselves : are we the only one interested by such questions ? We are not indeed. Some authors have wrote on the subject. We will, under the title “Refutability”, quote some of them as an introduction to the workshop.
Refutability
“Respectable software development depends on refutability (-..). A domain description of the system’s environment, or application domain, claims to describe how things are ; a specification or requirement claims to describe how things are when the System is installed and operating. Both of them must be refutable. The domain description must run the risk that someone will say : ’That’s not true - here’s a counterexample’. And the requirement description must run two risks : that your customer will say : ’No, that’s not the effect I require’ ; or, later : ’Yes, that was the effect I required, but the System isn’t achieving it - just look at what it did here”’.[Jac95] “System design is often described as a problem-solving activity. The engineer has a goal, defined by the required System behavior. He must discover a way of achieving it and convince others that this way will work.”
The model (...) is no more a theory about the CBM Company’s requirements [Coh92]. In constructing it, we hâve interpreted the natural language statement of functionality (...). We have had to make decisions about both functionality and structure where these two documents were silent. Theses decisions are not necessarily either correct or complete. But there is no way to evaluate them without referring back to the “owners” of the problem, the executives of the CBM Company themselves. Of course, they may not be able to assess the validity of our model by reading it themselves (although there are historical precedents for teaching clients just enough mathematics to allow them to do so). Our only recourse in such circumstances is to present some of the more ” surprising” properties of our model to the clients so that they may have the opportunity to “réfuté” them. This is an exercise in "scientific method”, as laid down by Sir Karl Popper, who showed that actively seeking such refutation was the only way to gain a high degree of confidence in a scientific theory, but that even that could not prove that it was true. How, then, are we to identify, and conduct, appropriate réfutation experiments? One way is merely to recount the assumptions we have made (...). Alternatively, we might treat the model as a “prototype” and allow the customer to “exercise” it by performing a series of transactions and observing their effects. (...)
A further alternative would be to prove some theorems about the model’s behavior and to interpret these into natural language for the client’s inspection and approval. We would aim to select theorems which said as much as possible about those aspects of the Systems behavior which the original specification said least about. (…)
Considering that it is the rôle of the software developers to ask the right questions to the customer as it is a doctor to ask the right questions to their patient. Considering that, if the “The programmer’s task is ... to give a formal proof that the program he proposes meets the equally formal functional specification.” [Dij89], “This is a noble goal, but it presupposes that someone else has done all the hard work by managing to create a formal functional specification that is appropriate to the task at hand.”, we proposed to the international software community that they answer :
“What questions are prompted by ones particular method of specification ?”
for a small case study about invoicing. Primarily, the workshop will be the event where these questions are presented. However, it will also provide an opportunity to :- present the specification of the ‘invoicing function’ through different methods, formalisms, languages- compare different methods, formalisms, languages over the same case study
This workshop is the 9th meeting of the series “Putting Into Practice Methods and Tools for Information System Design”.
The conference will start with an invited presentation about the industrial application of two methods with two different paradigms, B and LDS/SD "
without the bibliography, which is available upon request.
Bibliography, History of my teachings
I have also just written my bibliography. I provide to the person or people who have difficulty falling asleep. As well as the history of my teachings, around and around.
Articles
