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Bertrand Meyer

Dr. Bertrand Meyer is an academic, author, and consultant in the field of computer languages. He is Chief Architect at California-based Eiffel Software and Professor of Software Engineering at ETH Zurich—the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology—where he pursues research on building trusted components (reusable software elements) with a guaranteed level of quality. Dr. Meyer was the initial designer of the Eiffel method and language and has continued to participate in its evolution. He also directed the development of the EiffelStudio environment, compiler, tools, and libraries through their successive versions.

Dr. Meyer is the author of numerous articles and over ten books on software engineering, including the best-seller “Object-Oriented Software Construction”. He is an ACM Fellow and has received the ACM Software System Award, the Dahl-Nygaard prize for object technology, and Harlan D. Mills Prize, and is a member of the French academy of technologies. His most recent book, “Touch of Class: An Introduction to Programming Well Using Objects and Contracts,” applies advanced software engineering techniques to the introductory teaching of programming.

He is also active as a consultant on object-oriented system design, architectural reviews and technology assessment, trainer in object technology and other software topics, and as a conference speaker.

Presentation: Multirequirements: Giving software requirements their due

Everyone knows (in spite of the agile propaganda) that requirements are critical for software systems quality, but in practice many projects define requirements poorly. One of the biggest obstacles is that people often treat requirements definition as a separate activity and the requirements themselves as a separate product of the software lifecycle. The notion of multirequirements, introduced in this talk, rehabilitates requirements as a first-class citizen in the software lifecycle.

Multirequirements result from a radically new view, seamlessly integrating requirements with the other processes and products of software engineering. They subsume the classical opposition between formal and informal approaches to requirements engineering, and combine many styles: textual, mathematical, graphical. Rather than yielding a separate product, multirequirements are closely intertwined with other artifacts of the software lifecycle, such as design and implementation, supporting the key goal of traceability. They take full advantage of object-oriented ideas, which can be as effective for requirements as they are for programming.

The talk will present the notion of multirequirements, illustrate it through a number of examples, contrast it with older approaches such as model-driven engineering, and discuss its role in a modern, seamless style of object-oriented software development.